12 January 2024 extended through 30 March 2024
Charles Bound (b. 1939, NYC) has worked variously as a publisher’s representative, secondary school teacher, published poet, theatre worker, and, since the mid- 1980s, as a potter and ceramic artist. His earliest works in this, his first retrospective exhibition, are largeish wheel thrown, gas-fired pots whose symmetrical forms and gestural, highly activated surfaces only hint at the departures the artist would subsequently make from the wheel’s enforcing symmetry. Spurred by his close and careful reading of African and Japanese ceramic history, and by the fortuitous acquisition of a wood-fired kiln, Bound’s post- mid-90s ceramic productions are gnarlier, less symmetrical, and seemingly derived from complex natural phenomena: cart tracks through mud; buried “antique” forms; erosion, wind and rain, and other natural processes. More recent works collage, recombine & refire failed and broken ceramic experiments, or seem indistinguishable from shapes created by undirected geological processes.
