2007 Regional Best of Show

This past March, University of Dallas mounted two simultaneous solo shows, for Laura Kukkee and Barbara Frey, the two honored winners of the University of Dallas Regional Ceramics Competition held in early 2007. Val Cushing juried the Regional show, and selected Frey's and Kukkee's work from among over a hundred considerable artists from all over the region (Texas and its bordering states plus Colorado, Kansas and Missouri).

Hailing from Maryville, Missouri, where she teaches at Northwest Missouri State University, Laura Kukkee's exhibition, Uncontained, featured fourteen vessel forms, all made within the year since the Regional exhibition. Her pieces are a festivity of activity, contrast, and the play between two-dimensional becoming three-dimensional and going back again. She focuses on the "charged spaces occupied by ceramic objects," and thus her work "remixes and reinterprets the formal language of ceramics through exaggeration, abstraction and the rhythm of repetition."

Her elaborate handles, growing out of two-dimensional designs that begin on the main body of the vessel, sprout up and out to entwine and weave above and around the main bodies of the pieces, activating the space around the pieces in a frozen moment of near frenzy. The intensity of this frenzy, however, relies and depends upon the strength of the bodies of the vessels from which they grow. The main bodies of the vessels, many of them oval in form, ground the pieces, and keep them rooted, controlling them just enough that we do not find ourselves getting hopelessly lost in the tangle of movement from the handles.

It is a two-way street, the relationship between the handle and the main body of the vessel. The main body keeps the handles firmly grounded, but at the same time the handles lift the body up and breathe into the piece a whole new sense of life, of movement, of reaching and growth.

Kukkee turned to a subtle use of glaze in order to bridge the gap of contrast between the bizarrely busy handles and the stoically stable bodies of the vessels. The glazes, for the most part somber in palette, run and drip and pool all over the vessels, following curves with the easy power of gravity and settling with glee (and sometimes glassy beads) into nooks and crevices among the handles and the bodies alike. Rivers of glaze run away down towards the bases of the vessels, a solid two or three inches of which she left unglazed in some cases, to reveal the warm glow of her earthenware-like stoneware clay body. The overall effect of Kukkee's glazing goes back to that two-way relationship; it calms the handles enough to make them belong to the body beneath them while at the same time it activates the body, moving over it with subtle serenity.

Barbara Frey, who teaches at Texas A&M University-Commerce, walked the viewer down the progression her work has taken over the past four years or so. The earliest pieces she selected are from her Crown series, which led into her Sticks and Stones pieces, which in turn have led into her recent "debris crowns." Her use of the crown rises out of its direct representation "of power, dominance, and hierarchy of achievement." The Crown series provokes a new perspective on this archetype and requires a reconsideration of its meaning. With Crowns #8 and #9: Sticks and Stones, Frey expanded and abstracted the crown form, in a direct response "to Albert Einstein's famous statement in a letter to President Harry S. Truman: 'I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones.' "

In her more recent "debris crowns," we find a new heavy focus on, as their names indicate, debris. It does not consist of rocks and dirt that she brought to her pieces; rather she made every grain, every pebble and shard. In her execution of these pieces, Frey plays on our idea of debris and how we treat it, especially in the aftermath of destruction, such as with the 9/11 attacks, Hurricane Katrina, or the shuttle crash over Texas. Her meticulous crafting of all her debris strikes most poignantly in reference to 9/11, for which "the exacting nine-month clean up of Ground Zero required that every fragment on site be closely examined, identified and categorized in the effort to retrieve all human remains." In looking at Frey's debris piled in and around her crowns, we find her hand in every aspect of the piece, even the miniscule fragments, and we see a direct correlation to a strange amount of preciousness and care of debris in the wake of near sublime destruction.

At the time of the University of Dallas Regional Ceramics Competition, 24 of the 62 participating artists were given an Award of Merit. Mr. Cushing recognized these outstanding artists for their vision, creativity, and achievement. Awards of Merit were given to: