REVIEW Sally Michener: Back to the Future ty amy Gogarry

For forty years, Sally Michener has exerted a critical influence
on ceramic culture in Canada, both as a teacher and as an artist,
exhibiting her ceramic sculpture and installations across Canada and
abroad. Her first career was in social work, for which she earned an
MSW from Columbia University in New York City, and she received
an MFA in ceramics from the University of Cincinnati in Ohio prior
to immigrating to Canada in 1973. She has participated in ceramic
residencies in Canada, Mexico and China. Because most of her works
are site-specific and created for major venues, her work has not been
seen here in Vancouver to the extent it deserves. To remedy this, the
PGBC Board invited Michener to create an exhibition for the Gallery
of BC Ceramics. The Board’s original request was for a retrospective,
something the artist did not feel was possible given the small scale of
the gallery. However, in discussion with long-time friend and art critic
Mary Fox, Michener agreed to an exhibition that identified recurring
“stylistic and formal features,” signposts of her artistic development
over the years.

Due in no small part to intelligent curating, Sally Michener: Back to
the Future is a satisfying, if concentrated, collection of twelve smaller
works ranging from the artist’s earliest ceramic efforts (a teapot made
when she was twenty) up to and including her most recent mosaic
busts (Pieced Together Man #8, 2012). Victoria-based Fox, who wrote
extensively about visual arts in the seventies and early eighties when she
worked professionally as a curator, brings years of friendship and close
attention to Michener’s artistic development to the selection process,
made collaboratively with the artist. The human figure has featured in
Michener’s work throughout her career, possibly reflecting her early
interest in social work. The theme of the figure, the column and the
use of architectural space recur in this exhibition to give substance to
the artist’s long-standing concerns.

Connections between architecture and the figure are suggested
with Pair of White Columns #5 (1976) and Column Series: Balance Act
(1979). Learning that classical Greek columns were based on human
proportions, Michener began to construct maquette-like works
incorporating arches, columns and balancing figures, as in Balance Act,

a dark-slipped stoneware tableau. Michener’s study of world traditions

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Pieced together man #8, 2012, by Sally Michener. Photo by Lee Roberts.

of ceramic art, particularly tribal art, inspires work from this time,
as can be seem from the simple expressionistic figures and designs
painted onto White Columns. This early work serves as a precursor
to the dialectic between form and surface decoration that plays out
throughout her career.

The figure-as-column metaphor culminates with the Granville
Island Hill Installation of 1981, represented here by Mary Ann and
Elisa, two of the sixty figures that comprised the original installation.
‘The installation is the subject of a Surrey Art Gallery e-book, which
provides helpful background on the sculptures (see: www.surrey.ca/
files/Michenerl.pdf). Working with students and volunteers, the
artist constructed tall, terra cotta columns using coils, an ancient
method for constructing pottery forms. Rather than smoothing and
melding the coils, Michener left them intact, creating a decorative and
organic surface to the columns. Topping each column is a naturalistic
head, modeled with rough slabs onto plaster masks moulded from
students and friends. The use of masks contributes striking realism
to the heads, and their resemblance to specific individuals gives them
their proper names. Swaying gracefully on their slender columns, the
meditative heads recall figurative traditions such the terra cotta busts
of Benin. Unfortunately, the original installation was vandalized,
but components that remained intact now survive as independent
sculptures.

The focus on the head as the source of individuality is carried
further in two more works, About Face: Red, from 2005, and Outside/
Inside Reflection from 2007. The former is more loosely sculpted from
earthenware and glazed in glossy shades of red. The form has a face on
both sides, held between hands that suggest either despair or surprise.
Outside/Inside is a more serene, celadon-glazed porcelain form, which
resembles a vessel with the face pressed into it. Like a photographic
negative, the edges of the form catch and intensify the glaze; the
face appears to project out in a quiet, meditative play on inside and
outside, positive and negative.

Corridor, from 1985, highlights the artist’s interest in architectural
space and surface decoration in a different way. The work consists
of a slab-constructed tetragon, wider at one end. Open and closed

A Diane C. (right) and Barb G. (left), detail, by Sally Michener.

POTTERS Photograph by Cameron Heryet.
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