Rosemary Mayer—Sculpture / Joanne Howard—Paintings
Rosemary Mayer's sculpture of rag vellum hardened into vessel shapes with rabbit skin glue and ribbed with pliable twigs are like symbols or reminders of ancient urns. But they could also have just arrived from outer space.
She's fashioned these sculptures to shapes resembling vases, vessels, grain jars, water baskets and amphorae of, say, Mycenean times but these new creations dwell in a realm beyond memory. They hint at and are based on the shapes of those useful and traditional pottery objects but the graceful nod of appreciation and tribute to them is only the starting point for this sculpture. These versions, though functionally useless, affect the mind and body by creating objects of a new pristine universe. They're symbols borrowed from a dream. We're transported.
It's hilarious the way they differ from classical pottery—the forms melting in on themselves, collapsing as if in the sun a few thousand years too long. These shells are the guts, soul or idea of the form, here transmogrified and given independence as a new object. The refinement of their careful reshaping into these other earthly pieces, is a step of adjustment. They've become icons of a transferred glory.
Since they're based on forms we're familiar with, we can get a handle on the experience of viewing them, but as art they're unlike anything we've ever seen. They have a commanding presence though are obviously light and seemingly fashioned from air. They're tied to the earth in their organic frailty full of wind-blown curls and tempered textures.
Urn, i.e., has the massive strength and tension of Rodin's Balzac in its sweeping angel-wing curves yet, too, it sits patient and receptive.
Seven ink drawings accompany the sculpture, linking each to its corresponding antecedent and Greek name.
Joanne Howard's paintings (some on plywood and some on canvas) are a perfect pairing since they too deal with essentials of the planet's flow. Her paintings depict almost microscopic views of flora, rock fields, a river winding its way through the solid planet, plant life below the surface of water. They remind one of the marvelous illustrations we used to see in, say, a Time-Life book on the origins of life on earth. A few paintings are more fantastic and combine some aspect of geology with an imaginative scene of a cracked recess.
(Arts, September 1985)