Kathy Butterly: Out of one, many / Headscapes

November 4, 2022 through March 5, 2023

Presenting three decades of Kathy Butterly’s imaginative small-scale ceramics

Kathy Butterly: Out of one, many / Headscapes presents over three decades of the artist’s small-scale ceramic sculptures. Butterly describes herself as a painter who happens to work in clay. With 30 years of experience with porcelain and using hundreds of glazes, the artist has extraordinary command of form and color. Butterly works on a domestic and intimate scale, but her sculptures belie their size in meaning and complexity. She pushes each of her ceramic sculptures to the limits of its material possibilities. Hers is a painstaking process of firing porcelain, a medium that can be both luscious and unforgiving. She finds virtuosity and rigor in the small, always pushing the piece to the limits of its material possibilities.

The artist splits her time between Maine and New York City—each having equal weight in her creative process. She explains that Maine allows her to unwind, slow down, watch, and absorb the natural world and its systems while NYC, with its own pace and complexities, adds different energies, tensions, and dynamics that complement, support, and contradict themselves within her work.

The PMA is proud to present two major bodies of work by Butterly. Out of one, many displays Butterly’s imaginative powers and technical brilliance applied to a single pint-glass form over many years, producing astonishing variations. The sculptures are anthropomorphic, playful, intricate, provocative, and barely five inches tall. Whereas the smaller cup forms reference the body, a new series of works alludes to the human head. In Headscapes, Butterly takes formal variation to a grander scale. Including 10 new works created especially for the exhibition, this recent series of sculptures makes room for what Butterly refers to as “journeys of the mind,” entering a psychological realm of unease. Taken together, the works evidence Butterly’s singular aesthetic and technical mastery of the medium and reveal an evolution in her practice in scale and content.

Out of one, many

Out of one, many presents Butterly’s “cup forms” from 1996 to 2018, including the first in the series, Spring (1996). A single form serves as a starting point: a pint glass. We are witness to an astounding range of transformation with all works derived from the same cast. Each piece has its own distinct personality, which the artist attempts to bring out during the process of making. For Butterly, each work is a persona—developing and becoming more itself as time goes on. The vessel form is inherently anthropomorphic, with parts of it described as a neck, handle, or body. Whereas Butterly explores female figuration and its stereotypes in these works, they are abstracted by the ceramics’ bulges, contortions, exposed orifices, and lumpy midriffs. These abnormal bends and curves make the cups impossible to use—they resist the expected functionality of a vessel. Butterly has described these works as looking inward—to her persona as an artist, her concerns, thoughts, and feelings.

Headscapes

Headscapes features recent work, made since 2019, and the premiere of 10 new sculptures. Butterly’s work always starts from a readymade cast—in this case, a spherical vase, similar to a fishbowl, serves as the base form. These works allude to the human head, and Butterly refers to them as “headscapes,” or “brain planets,” given their likeness in shape and size to a portrait bust. In some cases, the folds of the final forms even appear like grinning mouths. Butterly describes the blocks under each work as a podium, a place from which the work can metaphorically speak.

Whereas the cup forms look inward, these new works are about the world outside. She describes them as “journeys of the mind,” imbued with the anxieties of our current crises. Blue (2020) is self-referential in terms of the color of the glazes and speaks to an emotional state while slyly suggesting a longed-for “blue wave.” Made obsessively and tending toward maximalism, each headscape reflects our complex and uncertain world.About the Artist