Pae White a conversation on clay

One of the things that I love about clay is that there are innumerable variables, all of which factor into the final output. If not considered properly some of these variables can cause the clay to crack or explode. So attention to the compatibility of materials is important as long as there remains enough room to allow the surprise of a happy mistake. The suspension of one’s expectations is crucial since the surprises can be so seductive as to cause one to change course completely.

This humble, ancient material is responsible for so much beauty and so much heartbreak.

2020 has really been ‘the year of clay’ for my studio. In tandem with and in contrast to the hi-tech and admin-heavy projects, clay has offered something different, something slower. It’s changed the studio production into something more personal and quiet, almost meditative in tone. In many ways, clay has provided a much-needed breather in an often chaotic space.

I find myself drawn to materials that have the ability and the range to represent something that could not be further from themselves. It’s a sort of dematerializing to the very core. For instance, when I work with textiles, I typically start with the combination of cotton and polyester, which could not be more basic. My hope is to coax the magic out of this also humble material – and to see if it may have a dream of being transformed into something that it is not – something reflective and deep and dimensional – and magical. Maybe it’s all an illusion but illusions have their own reality.

Clay has almost more universality than any material I know. I believe that everyone at some point in their life has worked with it in some form or another – even if this means just playing in the mud or handling cookie dough. 

In 2019, I was awarded two large scale commissions, one public and one private. In the past I had purposely avoided using clay - specifically tiles - because it felt like the default material for maintenance-minded bureaucrats within public art programs. However, I wanted to work with an old friend, José Noé Suro, the owner of Ceramica Suro in Guadalajara. We hadn’t worked on a project together for 12+ years and I missed it. I put these projects forward as a way to reconnect and began a series of trips - pilgrimages, really - to begin exploring clay and Mexico itself in a deeper, more complex manner. 

The private commission at Hudson Yards inside the law offices of Milbank LLP offered a unique set of circumstances. There were four walls that sort of faced each other and lots and lots of reflective surfaces: I saw the potential of the artwork echoing throughout the space. I chose to explore the idea of four seasons, and because I love super graphics and manipulation of type, I saw this as an opportunity to process it all through the range of production options at Ceramica Suro, resulting in four super-graphic murals using richly glazed terra cotta tile to evoke each of the seasons.

It was important with the Four Walls project that the solid and very opaque material of terra cotta feel like overlaid tissue paper and that the illusion of an almost gossamer lightness be played up – and to embody the idea that perhaps each of the four walls had captured some aspect of that season - the color, the light, the feeling - to be experienced by the viewer any time of year.

Two large-scale artworks of mine were recently installed in the escalator volumes on the street sides of the 7-story Beverly Center in Los Angeles. Each of these projects employs a single material to interrogate the elusiveness of light in different ways. The piece on the north façade uses neon to explore tonalities of daylight (in a city where this exists in excess), while the piece on the east façade incorporates an array of 75,600 ceramic tiles to express the many subtle and poetic manifestations of moonlight.

As I approached the project, I asked myself a number of questions: How does one trap moonlight? How does moonlight on water spread? How does moonlight change with the seasons? For me, one of the biggest challenge was how do I transform a single color into a mega-uber-super-color? If I were to start with a single point of color, or perhaps a module, how do I make this module richer, expansive, more intense?

Mexico has such a strong tradition of amazing clay production; every region has its own way of doing things, often engaging a very specific type of clay based on the local soil. In Oaxaca, for instance, there is this beautiful black clay from which I've made chandeliers that, when burnished, looks almost metallic, similar to graphite.

When working with new materials, I have learned more from production mistakes than the successes. Taking advantage of the unplanned, the miscommunicated, or the misinterpreted sometimes launches me into an exciting new direction. The only way get access these “problems” is to suspend one’s expectations, to listen to the materials, and to let them tell you their stories.

When I was growing up in Pasadena in the 1960s and 1970s, the Pasadena Art Museum had become an important institution for modern and contemporary art in the United States. Walter Hopps was curating exciting exhibitions, such as the first retrospectives in this country of Marcel Duchamp, Kurt Schwitters and Joseph Cornell. Since I was already taking Saturday art classes at the museum, I was able to view many shows that a typical 6 or 7 year old might never see. I distinctly recall the exhibitions of Warhol and especially of DeWain Valentine – whose work I became obsessed with. In addition to the exhibitions, the museum architecture itself had a huge impact on me. It was designed by John Kelsey and almost completely clad in smoked-earthy ceramic tile by Edith Heath. 

pae white (b. 1963, pasadena) lives and works in los angeles, and will be the subject of a solo exhibition at kaufmann repetto, milan, in 2021. 

pae white's work has been exhibited internationally in solo exhibitions at the san josé museum of art (2019); le stanze del vetro, venice (2017); henry art gallery, seattle (2015); mak – austrian museum of applied arts, wien (2013); langen foundation, neuss (2013); south london gallery, london (2013); and many others. white has participated to the ngv triennial, national gallery of victoria, melbourne (2017); the whitney biennial (2010); and the 53rd venice biennal (2009), and her work is in the permanent collections of the art institue of chicago; hammer museum, los angeles; jumex collection, mexico city; mak, wien; moca, los angeles;  moma, new york; sfmoma, san francisco; stedlijk museum, amsterdam; and the tate modern, london, among others. 

click here to read more about pae white.

 *All quotations from an interview with the Pae White on April 30, 2020.