Line of Sight Theme

LINE OF SIGHT THEME 

The focus of our show is "Line of Sight": the direction in which a person must look in order to see a particular object. The conjunction of ceramic and watercolor works explore the interplay between proximity and distance. Jennifer’s ceramic elements bring to the fore the detail, texture, and form that we experience when we engage in landscape. Rebecca’s watercolor paintings layer the effects of distance and proximity with the sense of atmosphere and space. 

Both of the elements foster what Robert MacFarlane describes, in his book Wild Places, as correspondence. “There is no mystery in this association of woods and otherworlds, for as anyone who has walked the woods knows, they are places of correspondence, of call and answer. Visual affinities of color, relief and texture abound. A fallen branch echoes the deltoid form of a streambed into which it has come to rest. Chrome yellow autumn elm leaves find their color rhyme in the eye-ring of the blackbird. Different aspects of the forest link unexpectedly with each other, and so it is that within the stories, different times and worlds can be joined.” 

In this joint exhibition, ceramic and watercolor pieces illustrate how together they can create sightlines, combining to form landscapes in our minds. Landscapes, in nature, are captured and created by the limited aperture of the eye. Landscapes do not exist until human perspective forms them—without human perspective, there is only the vast raw form of nature. Coffin’s forms present the detail, texture, and tactile immediacy of nature’s forms up close. Anderson’s abstracted landscapes layer the effects that distance and proximity have on things seen from above, close to the water’s edge, through a copse of trees, or from afar.

In the forms that Coffin creates, she displays the organic connection between the pot and the common materials it is made of. Her work shows the beauty and roughness of clay, contrasted with brush-work that emphasizes the creamy textures of white slip and washes. As we view landscape, our line of sight first falls upon earth, clay, plant life, rocks, sand, and water. These are here reinterpreted in pottery forms. Coffin uses brushes made from the hairs of rabbit, fox, and deer to achieve her surface decoration. Her works in this show inspire us to see, in a new light, the commonplace elements we encounter in nature.

Anderson’s watercolors are preoccupied with the essential structure and geometry of landscapes. They often present a stark, contrasted joint where earth and sky, or water and land meet to form horizon or shore. Others combine and collapse multiple vantage points together—an effect visible in “Incoming Tide, or James and York Rivers” where aerial topography and the short-focus view of the incoming tide edge share the same plane of view. In “Fossil Storm” she recreates three dramatic horizons: the closeness of the cloud cover, the coldness of a bay in winter, and a far distant black storm, using paint she has made from minerals, fossils, and other organic matter found within the landscape she painted.

Coffin’s clay forms and Anderson’s paintings are created, in part, from foraged and found organic matter. Dimension and topography emerge from fossilized shells, mineral clay, and grapevine charcoal. Together, ceramics and watercolors help us see and observe in more detail the experience of place, pointing to a time or place that is recognizable in our own experience, either remembered or hoped for.