Katherine Taylor

I have been making sculptures about the place where I live, particularly about how our relationships with the land and with each other have changed through time. For each sculpture, the specific narrative shifts, but what all of the sculptures have in common are references to the body, the landscape, and change. Change and time are things I think about a lot in my sculptures, both conceptually and technically. I am especially interested in the different ways that ceramic processes document time, how concise moments are captured in the clay, and how glazes record time as they move, transforming the sculpture in the kiln. I use running glazes on my sculptures as a layer of content that pools over the imagery, connecting contrasting parts into a single object that can describe the experience of a place.

Lately, I am thinking about how time is recorded on a pot through forming and firing processes. The fabrication method chosen for making a pot creates an impression of speed. Throwing lines can be fast but marks from a mold can seem motionless. My slip cast forms appear slow and relaxed, while the glaze that settled on them in the kiln punctuates a specific moment in time. Patterns on my nerikomi pots can seem both static and in motion as the colored porcelain pattern stretches to accommodate the shape of the form. Pots also have a way of feeling like they are always moving forward because a single pot is a moment in time that points to the pot that is coming next. I find that progression to be such a positive and forward feeling way to balance the rhythm of work and life.

In the early 1900s, East Texas potters made pairs of stoneware dogs to be sold as doorstops to local farmers. The pair that my Grannie had on her farm in Como Texas was roughly cast from press molds and glazed a creamy white with cobalt blue decoration. Dogs like my Grannie’s were only made in Hopkins County, but the paired dog form has historical connections to England, China, and Japan. Globally they can represent prosperity, power, protection, and social class. In Texas, they represented hope and a little bit of social civility in a time of poverty.

My Grannie cherished her East Texas doorstop dog. It was one of a pair that had been given to her mother as a welcome gift when she and her daughters were brought to live on the Blalock farm in Como, Texas. The pair of dog doorstops were purchased by the side of the road, on the way into town, traveling by horse and buggy. My Grannie was three years old in 1914, when her family moved from their cabin to Mr. Blalock’s farm. Mr. Blalock’s wife had died, and as was customary, he needed a new wife to care for the kids and for the farm. Farming was a tough social contract in those days for women. Women were workers. Life was dirty. This pair of doorstops brought hope.

Families from North East Texas know these blue and white ceramic dogs as a local antique, different from the paired dog figurines that were being made in the early 20th century all over the American mid-west. They would have been made near the end of the time period that the Victorian Staffordshire Spaniels were made in England. The earliest Staffordshire dog figurines from the mid 1700’s were influenced from Chinese porcelain exports that resembled the Chinese guardian lions or the Japanese lion dogs that guarded temples, palaces, or tombs. I think it’s incredible that the paired ceramic dog has shared symbolism across so many cultures and through so many centuries. To me, it is an example of how many cultures and places are connected.

I wanted to use the paired dog figurines from East Texas to make sculptures that described Texas culture. For my own dog forms, I fabricated press molds so that my casting technique would connect to those Texas potters of the early 1900’s. The original East Texas Dog figurines didn’t have bases, so I decided to make a base that could suggest a social context. The bases of my sculptures are inspired by the rectangle shapes of the cotton bales from industrial farms in West Texas and in East Texas. Instead of cotton, the bases are packed with fingers and hybrid forms that suggest both human flesh and the landscape. The fingers represent labor, and the violence of the social inequality that built the farming culture of Texas. The bright yellows, reds, and blues, relate to the colorful tarps that are on top of the cotton bales when they are in the fields, waiting to go to the gin. I used gold luster as decoration so that there would be a relationship to the Staffordshire style of figurines. I like that together, the dog figurines and the symbolic representation of the cotton bale can create an allegory that references the history of Texas farming culture. I like even more that the dog figurines suggest a relationship to other people and places whose cultures use a similar pair of figurines for different purposes.

I use a technique called nerikomi to create the colored patterns on my sculptures. The word nerikomi is a contemporary Japanese term used to describe the technique of layering multiple colored clays in order to create a repeated pattern. In America, we often refer to this as a Japanese technique, but similar colored clay techniques have been historically used in China, Egypt, Rome, and in more recent history throughout Europe. It is a technique that shares histories that connect pottery traditions across different places. I like the idea that by simply using the nerikomi technique, my Texas Doorstop sculptures reference ceramic traditions from places outside of Texas.

Texas Land Body is a series of sculptures that I’ve been working on for about ten years. Some of the sculptures are about specific places in Texas, and some of them are more about an emotional experience of being a part of Texas as a place. These sculptures are conglomerate objects that are composed of a variety of cast nerikomi porcelain forms. Each form is designed to represent a physical or emotional aspect of a real object, body, plant or building. Some forms are literal representations, and others are altered by memory and perception. Thick translucent glazes create a haze of bleeding color that unites the numerous parts of the sculpture into a single unit that represents the experience of a place.

The most recent sculptures in this series have cast forms in them that represent the rectangular cotton bales that you can see on the sides of the roads in West Texas and in North East Texas after harvest. These cotton bales are huge masses of compressed cotton covered with brightly colored tarps, often yellow, red, or blue. They are an intense presence that dot the open farmland in winter. Seeing them, I can’t help but think of the multiple ways that the history of farming cotton has defined how people in Texas relate to one another. Farming in this place has separated us by gender, race, class, and location. That history follows each of us by defining the social parameters of our culture. When I think of those cotton bales, I think of their compressed masses as containing the experiences of people, labor, hardship, shame, joy, and so much time and change. I include cast fingers in these sculptures to represent human presence and to help people feel connected to the image when they see the work in person.

Most of the sculptures from the Land Body Series were made before the Texas Land Body series. Both series share similarities in that they describe the experience of a place. The first several sculptures from the Land Body Series were made in 2006 during a residency in Taiwan. They were my response to the experience of the landscape and culture of Taiwan. For several years, I split my time between teaching in Texas and traveling to work at studios in Norway and in other parts of Taiwan. I made work in each location in response to the environment and aesthetic culture where I was. The last two sculptures in this group were built at Eye of the Dog Art Center in San Marcos and glazed at my studio in Austin, Texas in 2019.

When we moved to Austin, the house that we bought had a chicken house in the backyard. Clearly, the logical choice was to get baby chickens. We were in for quite a surprise. Keeping chickens is an examination of society with all of its joys and all of its heartbreak. Hens require great attentiveness and inventiveness from their human caregivers. They are curious about everything, and they often show affection to one another, and sometimes even to me.

When I started working in my new backyard studio, I started drawing chickens on my plates for fun. The first ones were wood fired and the color palette was limited to warm tones and black. During the pandemic, I started really pushing the drawings. I started photographing my hens and drawing their portraits on the pots. I was looking for expressions of joy, curiosity, and companionship.

These pots are made with my cone 6 porcelain body with clear glaze brushed on thickly. I rough out the drawings with pencil, right on top of the dry glaze. Then the drawing is brushed on in detail with oxide washes and ceramic stains.

I have been working with a colored porcelain technique called nerikomi for about 20 years. Nerikomi is a way to use colored clay to create a design that runs through the clay, as opposed to having a design sitting only on the surface. I like to compare the appearance of nerikomi pots to woven fabric, as opposed to printed fabric. Woven fabric has a pattern that is seen on both sides, while printed fabric shows the pattern only on one side. Similar to woven clothing, a nerikomi tumbler shows its pattern on the inside and the outside.

The nerikomi process involves making a block of clay by stacking colored clays in a particular way so that a pattern is formed that runs completely through the block. Patterned slabs can be cut from the block to be used to make shapes. I cut slabs from my nerikomi blocks to build both my sculptures and my pots. Since the clay slab has the pattern through and through, I have the freedom to stretch and bend the design to form compositions. The stretched pattern creates the feeling of motion and rhythm as the design moves around the form.

Wood firing is a process that involves using wood as the fuel source to heat the kiln. It requires a team of people to toss wood into the kiln’s fire box for 2 to 3 days in order to get the kiln to reach a temperature of about 2400 degrees Fahrenheit. The wood ash settles on the pots and creates glittering deposits and flash marks that result from the path of the flame flowing through the kiln.

I’ve had one foot in wood fire and one foot in cone 6 electric firings for about fifteen years now. Most of the time I fire with a group of friends at Tree on the Hill Pottery in Greenville, Texas. I also get to do wood fires with friends at Eye of the Dog Art Center in San Marcos, Texas. It is an understatement to say that wood fire teaches you how to make a good pot. Wood fire will always tell you when you don’t have it right. But when every person involved in the firing is in sync, and we’ve managed to control most of the variables, the results can be stunning.

It has been a long road for me to learn to make pots whose forms compliment the wood fire process. I would always work back and forth between cone 6 oxidation glazed surfaces and wood fired surfaces. Eventually I learned to stop thinking of it as surface, and I began to understand which shapes and marks were more appropriate for each type of firing. Through that process of learning, both groups of work have become more fulfilling and deeply rewarding.

The first time I went to Taiwan, we visited potters’ studios where I saw pots with glaze applications that looked like watercolor drawings. In my memory, those drawings looked like landscapes made of pure liquid glass. In that same trip, I visited a museum that had historic Chinese watercolors on exhibit. For the first time it occurred to me that Chinese watercolor and glaze decoration must have developed simultaneously. The clarity of color and spontaneity of the marks were incredible. For years after seeing those pots, I would attempt to clumsily develop my own glaze drawings on my pots. I was chasing my memory of clear flowing color that defined the surface of those Taiwanese pots. That memory continues to fuel my curiosity for developing drawings on my pots with glazes and washes.

I’ve been making a variety of pots that relate to our bodies. They are not specific to our genders, but rather have more to do with what it feels like to exist in a body that is fleshy, full, and sometimes saggy, but always beautiful and responsive to touch. The white Body Pots pictured here are slip cast with my translucent cone 6 oxidation porcelain body. They are all quite thin and tend to glow when in a ray of sunlight or held up to a lightbulb.

I also cast these Body Pots with my wood-fire porcelain clay body. You can find some images of the wood fired ones in the Wood Fire Pots gallery on my Home page. The wood fired Body Pots are not translucent, but the special thing about them is that the clay tends to carry the marks of the fire.

I started working in my South Austin studio in the summer of 2018. It is the home base for making my cone 6 porcelain pots and my sculptures. This is where I make my clays, glazes, and molds. It is also where I grow and cultivate my crinum lilies. My husband and I have an obsessive collection of rare crinum bulbs, and in the future we hope to include crinum lily bulbs for sale on special studio sale days.

Around the studio I have a large collection of Crinum Lilies from around the world. Crinums are absolutely awesome bulbous plants. They are beautiful, drought tolerant, long lived, and packed with history. Many of the most stunning crinum species originated in Africa and were brought to the Americas during the Transatlantic Slave Trade. The migration of these bulbs documents the movement of people as they homesteaded across North America. Horticulturalists have hybridized these bulbs for color, size, and fragrance. They are superior plants for erosion control, and can grow in just about any soil. With that said, they do best in deep, rich, compost with a good amount of manure for fertilizer. I use chicken poop….are you seeing the theme here? Chicken Lily Studio is named for the interdependence of the garden and the chickens for creativity in my studio.

Chickens, chickens, chickens! We have quite a few chickens running around outside of the studio. I think of them as interactive parts of the garden that wander around freely eating termites and dispersing fertilizer. Our chickens are a big presence at my studio with their silly antics and strange expressions. Their portraits are starting to make their way onto my pots.