Katy Krantz likes to leave things to chance, at least when it comes to making ceramics. She has a method, but it involves working with a “wild and crazy collaborator” — a giant gas kiln that can fire clay at extremely high temperatures. “When you fire that high, the clay and glaze react in ways that are unpredictable. You get a lot of weird, random spotting, things that I would never be able to paint on.” That element of surprise and transformation runs through her colorful, abstract sculptural objects and jewelry, as well as her block prints and recent forays into fabric. Though she’ll establish “loose parameters” at the outset of a project, she says she’s “never been able to work with a real detailed plan in mind. I can work like that, but I tend to make really boring work that way. When I have too much control, it’s less interesting.”
There’s been something serendipitous, too, in the way she’s put her art out into the world. A few years ago, when Krantz was living in Brooklyn, she walked into Saffron, a flower shop and gallery space in Fort Greene and approached one of the owners, Kana Togashi, in a move she says was out of character. “I was like, Hi, you don’t know me, but I make these ceramics, and I think your flowers would look really pretty in them. Do you want to come over to my studio and see them?” Togashi did, and offered Krantz a show. In addition to museum exhibitions, her works have also been shown in spaces like Iko Iko in Los Angeles and can currently be seen at Seattle’s Totokaelo, Propeller in San Francisco, and at Mociun in Brooklyn.
Krantz came to ceramics from a fine arts background, having trained as a painter. Feeling a little constrained and burned out in her practice, she decided to try her hand at coiling pots. “I was completely hooked. It slowed me down a lot, which is what I really like. With painting, you make a move on the canvas and you just go from there, each move builds on the next. Working with clay there are all these built-in stops. With each step along the way I had to stop and look and take my time. That was really good for me.”
Originally from New Jersey, Krantz has crossed coasts a few times, growing up in the Bay Area and graduating from UC Santa Cruz before heading to New York, where she got her MFA from Hunter in 2007. Four years ago, her husband’s medical residency brought them out to Seattle. She now does most of her printing and painting in a studio space below her apartment, while the kiln at Seattle’s Seward Park Clay Studio lets her gets as wild and crazy with clay as she wants.
Krantz lives in Seattle’s Capitol Hill neighborhood. Moving from Brooklyn, Krantz found Seattle refreshing for its livability and lack of pretension. “There’s really not a lot of ego.” The framed piece on the wall — “tiny little black ink marks that make up this organic form that looks a little like fur” — is by Krantz’s friend, San Francisco artist Sarah Appelbaum.
Covering the sofa is another work by Appelbaum. “She gave that to us as a baby shower gift. She collects and repurposes stuff, and she found a bunch of afghans and sewed them into the biggest afghan ever. I’ve never been able to fit it in a washing machine.” On the wall above are wood relief prints by Seattle-based artist Emma Levitt. “I love her work. It’s so minimal and simple. I’m drawn to it because she’s sort of the opposite of me.”
A painting by Krantz’s close friend, New York-based artist Emily Noelle Lambert, hangs above her husband’s desk, which is usually piled high with papers. “I call it his art installation. I wish I’d had the guts to leave it all out for the shoot, but it was also so refreshing to see it all cleared off.”
Her son’s “art corner.” Almost three, he’s “getting into painting and making collages.” Krantz taught elementary school art for several years and says it’s been a huge influence. “Watching the way kids work, their confidence and the way they put things together, the way they make compositions, is so interesting.”
On studio days, Krantz typically leaves her apartment “as quickly as possible,” heads downstairs with a cup of coffee or tea, and spends a few minutes intuitively writing before she gets going. “It’s made me a little more aware of themes running through my work, certain things come up again and again.” Lately those themes have to do with vessels, thinking “about them as little bodies, and thinking about how our bodies hold experiences and memories.”
A table in Krantz’s studio laid out with works in progress and remnants of previous work. “I tend to make a lot more than what I’m going to need for a show because I don’t exactly know, in the moment, where things are going to go, so I end up editing out things that don’t really work. But I generally save them and sometimes they’re great in another context.”
A shelf of supplies in Krantz’s workspace. While she keeps some low-fire underglazes here, she tends to use the high fire glazes made at Seward Park Clay Studio. “I’m more of a fan of stains and oxides, drawing on ceramics with them — just the straight up minerals, like cobalt, iron oxide, copper, mixed with a little bit of water. They go on the ceramic body in a smooth, lush way.” On the wall, to the left, hangs a piece from a past installation. Krantz took found materials and scraps from her old paintings and instead of gluing them down into a collage, she strung them up.
Krantz tends to work with “really groggy clay that’s good for building. Grog is like sand, so the clay has a lot of grit in it.” It’s stoneware, as opposed to porcelain or terracotta. Krantz hand builds her clay pieces in her home studio and then drives them over to the gas kiln. She’s tried low fire electric kilns, which take up less space and are easy to operate, but she didn’t love the unsurprising results. “You get exactly what you see – you paint on orange and you get orange.”
A glazed but unfired “plate” piece that will eventually hang on the wall. While a number of Krantz’s pieces could be put to practical use, she rarely conceives of her work that way. “I’m almost always thinking about it in terms of an art piece, something that has more symbolic value, that has my hand involved in it.”
Odds and ends from past installations, including a show at the cooperative Seattle gallery Soil. Part of Krantz’s process involves saving older pieces and re-purposing them into new contexts and arrangements. “I never know when something might become useful later.” She also finds it helpful to work with “materials that already have my hand imbued in them, so it’s not like starting from scratch.”
More bits and pieces, including some leftover beads from a series of ceramic-and-brass necklaces Krantz made in collaboration with jewelry and textile designer Caitlin Mociun.
The little head, center, was a model Krantz made for a kids’ clay class she was going to teach. “It was fun to make something representational in the midst of all these abstract shapes and forms.” The vessels at upper right are Krantz’s experiments in majolica. “It’s a process where you dip clay, after it’s been bisqued, in this glaze which is often white and it provides a really pristine canvas to paint on top of. It’s really beautiful if you do it right, but it’s really fussy, it tends to crack pieces a lot, and it shows everything.” Krantz’s verdict: “I don’t think this is for me.”
To the left: scraps from works on paper that Krantz strung together. She likes having these light, airy creations in her studio as a counterpoint to the earthiness of clay. In the corner are three vessels waiting to be glazed. Krantz is due in May with her second child and is aiming to make 12 of these vessels (she has six now) before she gives birth — “the ultimate deadline.”
Test tiles Krantz makes in order to see what kind of effects result from various glazes at certain temperatures.
“I love test tiles, visually they can be really pretty. I love seeing other artists’ test tiles. But they’re also useful as references. I have a horrible habit, I’ll make these test tiles but never label them. But with this one I was like, I’m writing the name of the stains and the oxides on the test tile so I can’t screw it up.”
Wooden pieces Krantz bought in Portland, at the import shop Cargo. She was told they’re meant to echo the shapes of cakes and pastries associated with a tradition in Japan called Girls’ Day. “I just love the forms so much.”
Foam forms that Krantz uses to make prints. “It’s a really fun, gratifying process to do in conjunction with the ceramics.” In contrast to the methodical slowness of working with clay is the speed with which Krantz can “just draw into foam, cut out whatever shape you want, then use a brayer to ink up the foam plate, and just press it on to paper.” She also finds the repetition satisfying.
A print Krantz made last fall by carving architectural forms into foam and then inking them on paper. “It dries really quickly and then I often will paint on top, just washes of color on top of them that add a little more depth.” Krantz’s use of color is fairly intuitive, though she notes that the different shades of green here “feel very Northwest,” as does the wood grain quality.
A collection of books that Krantz uses in works on paper. She acquired some of these while at a residency in upstate New York. Thinking she needed to be leaner in her approach, she went to that residency with little more than a roll of paper, a bottle of ink, and three brushes. “I got up there with these minimal supplies and freaked out. I’m used to having all my things around me and I thought, I can’t do this! There happened to be this giant library sale. I came back to the studio with six boxes of books. Like, now I can work!”
With ceramics, “you can’t be too precious,” says Krantz. She once gave a ceramic piece to a friend and when she went to visit, she saw that it had been glued back together. Another friend tried to hang a piece on the wall, didn’t have the right adhesive, and it came down in pieces. “If it’s a piece I’m really attached to, it hurts a lot. But I can’t get too attached, especially with ceramics.” The damage “could happen in the kiln, or at so many points along the line.”
Krantz has been experimenting lately with fabric dye on canvas and making soft sculptures. Unlike ceramics, “they don’t break, there’s nothing rigid about them.” In addition to her solo work, she’s been collaborating with New York artist Courtney Puckett. “We’re doing these little wall hangings. I’m sending her ceramic elements and she does fiber and fabric stuff, working with the pieces I send her.”
Artists “who straddle painting and sculpture often really appeal to me,” says Krantz. Last year, she saw an inspiring show at the Paula Cooper Gallery of Alan Shields’ work from the seventies. “He feels like a painter, he worked with canvas, but he just kind of exploded it.” She’s also drawn to the forms and color of the woven works of Sheila Hicks. Another influence: “This is really weird but there’s a gigantic Goodwill here and I love going in there and looking around at all the stuff people don’t want anymore, the mishmash of it, it feels like a giant collage.”
To know a ceramicist is to see their test pieces, and Bari Ziperstein has the kind of overflowing studio that doesn’t happen in a minute, that comes from years of private experiments and the hard work of learning not to care so much. “I think of these pieces as sculptural doodles,” she says, referring to a series of small, accidental ceramic sculptures. “They’re such a discrepancy from how I usually work, something no more than two inches. It’s really free and immediate.”
If you think about it, most ceramicists are obsessed with perfecting the clay — wedging it to get rid of bubbles, erasing seams that might come from using a mold, shaving off excess little bits. Jessica Hans is not that ceramicist. Her pots and planters are lumpy and misshapen. They have uneven mouths and aggressively irregular textures. When we visited her sunny, third-floor studio, on top of the South Philly row house she shares with her filmmaker boyfriend, our first thought was that her ceramics all looked like they’d walked out of the prop closet from a Tim Burton movie. (Which, if you read our site with any regularity, you know is one of the highest compliments we could give someone. We’re pretty into weird.)
Before he moved to Philadelphia in September of last year, Ben Fiess was living on a Minnesota farm, 20 minutes south of St. Paul, five miles from the nearest small town. “One of my friends in graduate school’s parents had recently retired and inherited the family farm,” Fiess says. “No one had been there for a decade or so, so it was in disrepair, but they actually had a lot of kilns and equipment because my friend’s mother taught art. It was a good opportunity to live for free and keep making work.” When he wasn’t making ceramics, Fiess spent his time planting asparagus roots, working at farmer’s markets across the border in Wisconsin, and ripping up sod. “I could go a week without seeing anyone unless I drove into the city,” Fiess remembers. So how is it that when we visited Philly back in January, every other artist and designer we met knew exactly who Fiess was? (“That guy moved to Philly? That’s so cool,” was the typical refrain.)
