Thanks to Susan Elena Esquivel for the work I so admired at the 57th Street Art Fair yesterday. I picked up one of her "dwellings." Some of the reasons I liked it: it had no ladder, it was covered in words, it is a pleasing and asymmetrical shape, it feels good to hold, the saggar firing process as she described it is organic, spontaneous, and outcomes from the firing are unpredictable. Other reasons I was drawn to Ms. Esquivel and her work include the freckles on her leg, her genuine smile and her willingness to explain the differences between raku and saggar. Here’s the piece she let me take home…
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nice one. are the words legible? i’m assuming she has two legs, are both freckled? or is it just the one?
On the freckle thing, just one… regarding legibility, sort of legible. Turning the piece one way and another I see words I recognize, then again maybe not. Is that “rain” or “ruin?” And while the words may have been coherent before the firing, now there is no connection from one to the next. So this has the suggestion of textuality without objective limits of meaning.