Gina Zycher: I Forgot Where I Was Going With This - is a meditation on the artist’s relationship to anxiety through the medium of ceramic and surface design. Tally marks, Twombly-esque scribbles, dainty florals and x’s and o’s, are applied to the surface of handbuilt and wheel-thrown stoneware vessels using both porcelain inlay and hand painting with deep indigo glaze on white. These motifs and the titles of her work, including: I Can’t Wait to Leave, Cool Girl, Anxiety Sampler, and I Actually Like It, refer to life-experiences associated with being overwhelmed, and prone to overthinking and worry. While the work of creating her ceramics often acts as the antidote to such states of mind, the constant unpredictability of the medium presents its own complications and frustrations.
She states:
“I started working with clay ten years ago and quickly discovered it was a rare activity that helped quiet my mind in a more profound way than anything else. It wasn't long before I started carving or otherwise creating patterns in my pieces as a soothing, repetitive undertaking. But I also find it tedious and frustrating, not to mention that the whole art of ceramics is fraught with anxiety. Will this crack? Will the glaze turn out okay? Somehow, I've found a way to simultaneously soothe and exacerbate my anxiety.”
Since childhood, repetitive, rhythmic activities such as doodling, stringing beads, knitting, and washing dishes have served as a distraction from Zycher’s overactive mind. In 2014 when she discovered clay, it became her place of reprieve and rumination. Her process of adding inlay patterns to her vessels involves meticulously hand-carving designs into leather-hard clay, filling the negative space with soft porcelain, and scraping the surface to an even finish once a piece has further dried. While artists like Zycher often obsess on details such as these, they also achieve a freedom by allowing the material and repetitive mark-making to guide their process. I Forgot Where I Was Going With This, implies a fraught yet fruitful forgetting, where intense focus gives rise to an organic unfoldment rather than a linear predetermined outcome.
There is a specificity of references throughout the collection that give Zycher’s latest work autobiographical dimension. A small, meek looking handbuilt vase titled, I Can’t Wait to Leave, is a stand-in for the artist, hyper-aware of the slow passage of time and eager to retreat from an unfamiliar situation to the safety of her home. A delicate floral motif applied to this vase evokes the Laura Ashley wallpaper from Zycher’s bedroom where she spent formative years from age ten to eighteen. The tiny buds appear again on a large wheel-thrown vessel with a bulbous lid, titled I’ll Be In Here, as in the solace of her bedroom during times of stress. A jar with an ornamental lid titled It’s Not a Toy, is inspired by a perfume bottle of her mother’s that fascinated the artist as a child - a mesmerizing artifact of the adult world she was eager to join but would eventually realize comes with its own set of problems. Anxiety Sampler, a robust lidded pot, showcases all of the inlay patterns employed throughout the collection, and acts as a visual vocabulary for the anxious artist.
/ About the Artist
Gina Zycher received a BA in American Studies and a BA in Film Studies from University of California, Davis in 2002. Her passion is ceramics, which she discovered in 2014. She has taught handbuilding and wheel throwing at Still Life Ceramics in Los Angeles from 2018 to the present. Her work has been exhibited at commercial galleries such as Giant Robot and Craig Krull Gallery as well as the Craft Contemporary museum in Los Angeles.
Gina Zycher: I Forgot Where I Was Going With This
October 27 - December 8, 2024
Collection Launch: Sunday, October 27th, 8:00 AM PT
Online at hannahsloan.com
Curated by Hannah Sloan
Hannah Sloan Curatorial & Advisory