Which fissure do you plug first on a quickly crumbling sea wall? Maybe you quit the ad hoc repairs and step back and let the water wash over you. Perhaps instead of a sea wall we need boats to flow with the current. The focus maybe shouldn’t be on the sea wall at all but on the wave itself. One must consider the source– the tremulous sub-oceanic shrug of the Earth rocking the surface. That source– that tectonic shrug– ripples through our culture in this historical moment. Our society is rending at several seams from internal pressure. The cultural subduction zone manifests in many tremors– racial justice, global environmental emergency, the collapse of cultural institutions and labor unrest– all appear as insurmountable problems. Small fissures meant to be addressed individually. Another view is that all erupt from a shared human desire to break apart existing institutions that are killing us all. The images on this work comes from the subconscious of the Americas. Jaguar men, flooded borders, six-breasted snakes inhabit picture planes made physical through fired glaze and clay. The pots are meant to confuse boundaries and contexts. A platter becomes a painting and a jar the cover of a book. The stories are fragments that rise up from the flotsam of overflowing rivers and besieged shorelines. 

I’ve lived next to Irving Park for 16 years. I’ve witnessed economic and cultural shifts reflected in the park. Seasons have come and gone- winter snow storms, radiant summer afternoons and honey colored autumn evenings. I am aware of the history that precedes me. I know for instance that the first builders of the neighborhood were Volga Germans. I see the names of long dead contractors imprinted in weathered concrete sidewalks. I know that after a devastating flood the area became home to a thriving African American middle class that eventually gave way to redlining and gentrification. I can sense several communities operating in the same space under different assumptions as if we all occupy alternate dimensions.  On any given summer afternoon all these various publics activate the park. The only beings who know this intimately are the trees.

The trees have witnessed the change from horse track to city park.  The trees may not be as old and venerable as other parks. They run the gamut from Ponderosa Pine to Northern Red Oak to Black Locust. They’re like unassuming old folks who sit on the stoop watching the neighborhood kids run by. It pays to occasionally stop and talk with these elders. Their slow moving stories may focus on long passed minutia but therein lies the meat of the thing. These witness trees are repositories of an invisible landscape; one that is flagged by memory and whose map lines overlay the neighborhood’s current configuration.

At some point recently I decided that I need to start listening to the trees. They are like my AA sponsors. They remind me to pay attention, to look. When my mental monkeys are noisily grinding their organs of distraction one or another of these Irving Park trees calls me to task. Trees after all are universes onto themselves. Their structures support many life forms and tiny ecologies. They burn warmly for our food and winter stories. And their forms provides excellent metaphorical sustenance to our myths and philosophies. Of course, I needed to do portraits of them. And those portraits must be rendered in the most traditional of easel painting. It is a way of forcing myself to understand the place I call home. There is no irony protecting me from whether or not these are affecting pictures. They carry the weight of  tradition; the ball and chain of a dubious history of landscape painting. Before you is the beginning of an attempt to know the trees of Irving Park and hear their stories.

Along with the paintings are small drawings that hint at the turbulent fast moving  events of human history. We must seem like the efflorescence of insects to an old tree. The drawings reflect the tumultuous change represented specifically in the neighborhood but also our times in general. We are always in flux.

“The Traveler & the Housewife” follows two lovers as they part on separate adventures. The traveler is irrevocably transformed in his far-flung travels to foreign lands. He returns bearing seeds of new crops and ideas. The housewife goes deep into the mythic soil of her homeland. Their reunion fuses two into one. “The Traveler & the Housewife” is part of a larger project called “The North American Codex”, a series of narratives published on pots, comics, wall drawings and poems. 

This comic was made possible by a Project Grant from Regional Arts and Culture Council in Portland, Oregon. I would like to thank Erika Leppmann of The Schneider Museum of Art at Southern Oregon University for giving me a studio for a month and mental space to conceive of and begin this work. The SOU residency was made possible by the Hallie Ford Foundation. Tracy Templeton opened the print studio to my use and was instrumental in the first run of prints. 

WHEN I MOVED TO PORTLAND from New Mexico in the late 1990s, I was creating sculptural clay vessels and drawings. The vessels referenced Northwest Coast feast bowls and burial canoes, earth architecture, and geology. The surfaces looked ripped, charred, and occasionally fleshy. In New Mexico, the integration of indigenous Hispanic and European histories, not to mention the geology—striped and splendid for all to see—really changed me. I worked for a while with Jicarilla Apache potter Felipe Ortega in La Madera, digging clay and living in his adobe house with no running water or electricity. It was magical.

The shape of a ceramic vessel is a form of embodied knowledge. I started using majolica because I could create such vivid, painterly contrasts between the white glaze and rough red clay. I was also interested in its roots in Renaissance ceramics. This rich tradition grew out of a European desire for Chinese porcelain, but lacking the technical knowledge to make porcelain themselves, European artists developed opaque white glazes. My recent body of work is influenced by this history, particularly Delftware and the Dutch trade empire in America. The inherent violence and uncertainty that accompany a nation’s manifestation in the world breeds an enormous amount of self-doubt. My vessels explore the contradictory states, such as uncertainty and arrogance, that arise from this process.

I’ve created vessels for years, but certain myths and stories have sparked my desire to breathe life into them. I read Michael Chabon’s The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Klay while I was working at a residential treatment center for boys. I realized that I’d been making golems for a very long time, and that for me, they were a meditation on the relationship between strength and power. The myth of the golem became the guiding metaphor for an ongoing body of work. The many faces of masculinity are also very important to my output. What is a man? What is a hero?

Vessels, myth, the written word, and narrative are my foundations. Because of my work with comics, I learned the value of sequential imagery. I see comic cells like ceramic shards that possess a physical dimension—they can be manipulated and assembled, spatially, to enrich a narrative and connect it to other physical objects. I think this concept has been with me from my earliest days working with ceramics, and has shaped my relationship to narrative. The vessel represents the confluence of the domestic (storage jars), the temporal (the ashes of a loved one), and the eternal (ritual and ceremony).

Some of the vessels and pots I make I also use, and that’s when they come alive. The cake platePyrrhic Victory contains an image of one of General Custer’s horses; it adorns the object with a kind of stateliness. But when someone uses the plate for sticky buns or Bundt cake—then what? I want to reside in the interstices between fine art, craft, and comics, searching for ruptures and spillovers. It enlivens the whole field to let wild cultivars breed into the monoculture.

— As told to Stephanie Snyder for Artforum, April 16, 2012

Ringing the Temple Bell is a performance, a workshop, a lecture series and a manifesto. The title describes a transcendent moment– the sensation of a reverberation inside your chest.

It is a three-day event first performed at Queer New York International Arts Festival in 2013. The three days reflect the cycle of creation – conception, formalization and ritualization. Its power lies in its uncategorizable nature. The three days would include the building of an earthen bread oven/kiln from local clay, lectures and a processional puppet show and feast. On a small scale I hope the piece could point to new teaching models and give participants insight into fresh ways of encountering art. Ringing the Temple Bell is designed with a basic structure and “script” but would accommodate the materials, grains and folklore of any given site. The goal is to create an experience that would transmit from individuals into the larger art world. Can such a small act transform existing institutions? Can art be transformative or is it simply a commodity? How can we break the chains of inherited categories of art making and its reception? The vibrations of the temple bell reverberate into the wider world. Ringing the Temple Bell is in-progress and open to other venues to be performed.

Ringing the Temple Bell was generously supported by an Artist Opportunity grant from Oregon Arts Commission, an Art Matters grant and the Ford Family Foundation. 

The Vexation of the Oak King was the second narrative dinner in an ongoing series. The first is the undocumented show Viable Seed done at Ripe in Portland in 2006. Vexation was designed to be performed on the Summer Solstice in conjunction with Museum of Contemporary Craft's Bowl Show. The dinner was created in collaboration with Stacey Givens chef and farmer at Side Yard Farms and sommelier Tom Champine. A series of texts were read before each course. The pots were made specifically for the dinner with each bowl acting as a panel of the entire story.

All letterpress by Tracy Schlapp at Cumbersome Multiples Press