Haw Contemporary

3/20/2015 – 5/02/2015

Exhibition Images / Press Release (PDF)

The work of Sanam Emami, Andy Brayman, and Del Harrow explores themes of function and design, volume, containment, furniture, and the body, but always with a particular sensitivity to nuances of repetition and variation in line, form and mark.

In his essay “The Workmanship of Certainty and the Workmanship of Risk” from The Nature and Art of Workmanship, David Pye presents the relationship between making with tools and making by hand not as binary activities but as fluid continuum – a back and forth – that informs and influences the other. Pye argues for the persistence of handmade things through the innate human response to particular kinds of variation – like the subtle variation in form found in nature.

The artists in this show explore the nuance of repetition and variation in made things. While each artist works in several materials, their practices are grounded in the use of clay, the material that most directly records the mark of both tools and hands. Sometimes made directly through the manipulation of clay with the hand, each also incorporates a range of tooling and processes. While this variation is not always a direct product of the hand – sometimes emerging from a computer controlled machine, a decal, or the phenomena of a glaze – the particular sensitivity always points back to the proximity and structure of a thinking hand, revealing an architecture of touch.