Mark Chatterley's Award Winning Contemporary Sculpture

Apr. 27, 2012

3:00 a.m.

Artist Mark Chatterley claimed to be the strongest man in the room. The room that he spoke of was Tory Folliard Gallery and filled with art lovers interested in his sculpture exhibition titled “Mark Chatterley: New Work.” His 5th solo exhibition in Milwaukee features less representational figurative sculptures and his unique animals that have captured awards across the globe. These include the Fletcher Challenge Ceramics Award from Auckland, New Zealand and the Taiwan Golden Ceramics Award from Taipei. The renowned sculptor's great strength comes from wrestling with his life size creations hand built from clay, covered in crusty and pitted surfaces as if hollowed out from the moon's craters. Currently on display at Folliard's, over 20 new works by Chatterley inhabit the gallery or adorn the wall in various proportions. Full size floor sculptures haunt the space like otherworldly creatures from the hidden places and reference the human nude in pieces such as Icon. Or view Chatterley\'s four seated figures head to head and turned upside down similar to a totem pole in his piece Meditation. Appreciate the ancient old tradition of mingling biology in the artist's small spirit figures, human bodies topped with animal heads suitable for hanging on a wall. While Chatterley enjoys working on a grand scale, his smaller pieces provide an opportunity to collect his work within an affordable price point. While admiring several of the sculptures that surround the artist, Chatterley stopped to discuss how he constructs his intriguing works that combine fleeting images of man and/or beast. Your sculptures are made of clay, although they give the appearance of cement or another material  with their unusual surface? What kind of clay do you use and how do you hand build them?<o:p> </o:p> I use a special formula for the clay, one of my own formulas, to give the pieces extra strength that can carry the size of the larger sculptures, and so it can be used indoors or out. I build up each large sculpture only six inches at a time and then work on 12 pieces all at once. Then the glazes I use are my own mixture, too, for a combination of the shiny and dull. I like doing that combination right now. I'm abstracting the vestiges of a frustrated painter. How and where do you fire these huge clay pieces?<o:p> </o:p> I have a huge kiln as big as a garage and I place 20 to 30 pieces at one time in the kiln, very tightly, so they all touch each other. Otherwise, they would fall down when they where fired. The touching [of sculpture against sculpture]leaves their own peculiar marks on the sculptures, which gives them another element of character and adds to their individual finish. The kiln will be heated to 2100 degrees Fahrenheit, white heat, and it's a pyromaniac's dream. Then the sculptures require three days to cool down before I can even touch them and sometimes need to be pried apart. The clay never changes color although the sculptures shrink about eight inches in the kiln even though the clay is specially formulated to reduce the amount of shrinkage usually seen with other types of clay, so I need to allow for that when hand building them.  How long have you been sculpting these pieces?<o:p> </o:p> I've been working as a sculptor for about 30 years, and I still like it that they can be used inside or outside. Lately, I've been constructing the smaller pieces such as the spirit guides or birdhouses to be fun and playful. I have one of the birdhouses in my own yard and I love watching the birds go in and out. I have a lot of crows in my back yard (Chatterley features numerous crows in his work) and they watch me. And so there are crows used all over in my work, like the piece here where they climb the walls vertically. A combination of the tribal or primitive vs. the mechanical and I enjoy the primal overtones to the sculptures. What are some of your favorite pieces in this exhibition?<o:p> </o:p> One of my favorite pieces is an elongated human form, Holes (boundary markers) [The armless and somewhat headless and thin, scooped out figure displays large holes along the sides] I enjoy the distorted shapes that come from the firing, the process that one [the artist] can not control. It just happens from the shrinking. They resemble human forms, yet, hardly could be called representational. Although the two figures in Kiss are more like actual human figures. It's combining the tribal into the mechanical process to create a contemporary art form. Tory Folliard Gallery presents “Marc Chatterley: New Work” through May 26. View several pieces on line at www.toryfolliard.com or visit the Historic Third Ward Gallery to see Chatterley's unique figures and finishes that defy description. Also view debut artist “C.J. Pyle: If You Only Knew” and his woven drawings resembling mysterious and sometimes ominous portraits. <o:p /> <o:p> </o:p> <o:p> </o:p> <o:p> </o:p> <o:p> </o:p> <o:p> </o:p> <o:p> </o:p> <o:p> </o:p>

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