Nancy Selvin
Critic David Roth has written, "Selvin's position in the top rank of ceramic artists has come through a process of rigorous self-examination … what differentiates [her] is that she eschews realism and functionality, indicating a level of intellectual engagement not always found among ceramicists.
[15][4] Selvin draws on diverse influences in her work, from early Japanese pottery to the California Clay Movement artists and Abstract Expressionists (particularly their emphasis on spontaneity, materials, and the dissolution of boundaries between surface and form) to less evident sources, such as the austere, slice-of-life photography of Walker Evans.
[1][20][2] Her "Teabowl" series (1981–2) offered spare, rhythmic, arrangements of simple elements engaging form, plane and line: chunky, squared ceramic tea bowls and thin rods of colored glass set on pearlescent, angled, lacquered trays.
[20][36] Los Angeles Times critic Suzanne Muchnic noted Selvin's "poetic sensibility and use of seductive color," which she wrote enabled the work to tow a line "between the honest earthiness of exposed clay and the precious refinement of lacquer over wood.
[38][18] The resulting work features a wide range of material and surface contrasts (exposed raw clay, ghostly layers of matte underglaze, fragmented text, splattered glaze, slate, metal, chalky drywall) and visible processes (expressionistic gouges and brushstrokes, seams, screened images, pencil markings, incised lines) that both individuate and unify the pieces and also draw in the viewer.
[38][41][31][27] Curator Suzanne Baizerman wrote that this approach lent Selvin's work, such as Still Life: Raku and Steel (1997), both a sense of thoughtful contemplation—in their minimal forms and compositions—and unstudied spontaneity, expressed through rustic surfaces and gestural brushstrokes.
[31] Initially, Selvin worked with saturated colors that muted the effects of light and shadow; her pieces from the late 1990s onward were increasingly painterly and adopted more limited palettes, often of earthy yellow, white and cream tones.
[38][5][32] Reviewers describe Selvin's still lifes as both poetic and meticulously ordered, likening them to haiku and the bottle paintings of Giorgio Morandi;[37][39][38] curator Mary Davis MacNaughton called it "quiet, understated work [that] encourages us to look for the visual beauty in everyday objects.
[7][41][25] Selvin's conscious stripping of practicality from her objects—plugged bottles, illegible labels, "books" without pages to turn, impractical tables—is a key component of the work, moving it beyond utilitarian and purely formal concerns to engage in metaphorical, often wry explorations of form, function and art, and appearance, illusion and reality.
Looking Through Glass (Berkeley, 1991) was a ten-by-sixty-foot, commissioned public work spanning eight, gesturally painted storefront windows with gold leaf borders, each containing a word; collectively, they read "Through the Viewer Art Enters the External World.
