The Clay Place displays one woman's life stories as told through her art

The Clay Place Gallery
By Kurt Shaw
Pittsburgh Tribune-Review Art Critic
Friday, May 30, 2003

Clay artist Ceil Leeper Sturdevant remembers those predawn trips during her childhood when she and her family would pack up their wood-paneled station wagon early on Sunday mornings and head north from their home in Franklin to Lake Erie.

Once there, she and her sisters - Jan, Kay and Helen - would collect shells while her father grilled a beachside breakfast of bacon, eggs and toast on a gas grill.

"It was just wonderful," Sturdevant says. "I remember we did it many times when I was a child."

It is her daughter, Helena, who collects shells whenever Sturdevant travels to Lake Erie these days. But she looks back on those early days fondly. So much so that it was the inspiration for the piece "Me and My Three Sisters," which is the first of 23 works in clay created by Sturdevant that visitors will see when entering the Clay Place Gallery in Shadyside, where her solo show "Works in Green & Blue" is on view.

Featuring four figures in a boat, each with a small shell in her lap, the piece is just one of several in the show that deal with the topic of life's journeys. It's something this artist knows a lot about, having traveled extensively throughout the world since first being bitten by the travel bug after a trip to Transylvania while just a teen.

"From then on, I loved to travel," Sturdevant says, "so every time I get a chance I go."

One of her favorite places to go is Japan. She has been there several times. The latest trip was just last year when she went to Kyoto, Nara and Osaka with 15 of her students from the Ellis School in Shadyside, where she has taught ceramics since 1981.

Three pieces from a series titled "Eastern Currents," which was inspired by that trip, are on display in this exhibition and each features a grouping of three kimono-clad ladies who appear wind-blown while standing in a boat whose sides seem to ripple and curl from imaginary currents.

Propped up on heavy steel coils, the boats and the figures contained within them are as texture-laden as they are full of suggested movement.

Sturdevant works almost exclusively in architectural clay, which not only can withstand drastic changes in temperature but also has an inherent crudeness. "I like the rough, nasty, gnarly texture of it verses porcelain, which is smooth," says the artist.

It's a quality that Sturdevant likes to play up with washes of black iron oxide and copper carbonate in all of her pieces. In some cases, she takes it to the extreme by adding a unique pearly white glaze that bubbles on the surface during firing. Once cooled, she tops it with a wash of gold gouache that settles on the unglazed surfaces exposed between the raised pearls of glaze.

Four large urns from her Maiden Vessels series that line one wall of the gallery exemplify this technique perfectly. Sturdevant describes the technique as being the result of a "happy accident" years ago when she once fired a piece with a similar glaze a little too long.

Accidental or not, it works wonderfully to complement, even enhance, the unique forms which also make reference to archaeology by way of looking like ancient objects recovered.

Such also is the case with six wall-hung pieces from her "Scrolls of Wisdom Series," where fluted forms are grouped like sea coral and interspersed with small figures in contrasting high-gloss glazes.

The only series not directly inspired by her travels, Sturdevant says of the body of work, "It's a political statement against oppression."

To that end, she has copied excerpts from "The Book of Secrets" from the Dead Sea Scrolls and placed them inside each of the fluted forms.

Travel experiences are again referenced in "Egyptian Sanctuaries I" and "Egyptian Sanctuaries II," which are large bird forms that were inspired by the fantastical animals in Dr. Seuss books and Gebi, an Egyptian goose symbol Sturdevant learned of on her travels to Egypt.

The three openings found in each of the pieces represent life choices, says the artist, but they also were inspired by Sturdevant's experience crawling through the ancient passageways of the Great Pyramid of Khufu at Giza.

Perhaps Sturdevant's favorite journey, though, is the one she currently is involved with - raising Helena, who is 3 years old.

It is a journey referenced in "The Embedded Hands Series," in which her hands cradle that of her daughter's. "It's her hands and my hands catching grasshoppers," Sturdevant says.

In a sweepingly symbolic gesture, Sturdevant has included the boat form again in each of the three pieces from that series on display.

"The boat is a symbolic reference to voyage," says the artist, adding that motherhood is her greatest voyage of all.