NICOLE SeISLER
LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA, USA
Nicole Seisler standing before her unfired clay installation Preparing, at Craft Contemporary, Los Angeles, CA, 2020.
Nicole Seisler, Hyperlocal Materialism (sifting), 2020. Local materials in local clays
Nicole Seisler, Holding Patterns, 2019. Unfired clay, overfired ceramic.
I feel like a tortoise. Although I am accomplishing things, most days trudge by and the ways in which I typically measure time have become either irrelevant or inaccessible. Even the sun has been obscured by wildfire smoke lately.
As an artist who typically considers functional ceramics to be a diversion adjacent to my primary practice, this feels like I’m divulging a strange secret or questionable habit: I have spent at least five of these pandemic months making plant pots. It was more instinctual than intentional at first, but I’ve come to realize that this functional ware is a direct response to how the ideas and projects I was previously working on (in my studio that I suddenly couldn’t access) felt inconsequential compared to our devastating and uncertain new reality. I began relying upon function because of its ability to evade context; planters will embody roughly the same meaning and purpose before, during, and after this strange period of time. I’m not sure yet how these objects may be important for my broader practice, but I do know that these containers make me feel rooted, and that, ultimately, it’s the clay that makes me functional.
Even after the stay-at-home order was lifted, I have continued to work at home instead of in my downtown LA studio, which also houses the contemporary ceramics gallery I direct: A-B Projects is currently a pre-pandemic time capsule. The exhibition of ephemeral work by Phoebe Cummings that opened in February will be, ironically, the longest running exhibition in the gallery’s five-year history. Installing a new show wasn’t possible initially, and it still doesn’t yet make sense to me, so I’ve been shifting gears to build upon previous gallery programming by developing the State of Ceramics “.edu edition”—an online discussion series with a collective curriculum of clay exercises and readings designed for educators and students currently pursuing ceramics in virtual space.
Gear-shifting is important: After three years of germination, I’m about to publish the first book in a boxset, Recipes for Conceptual Clay, which will feature over sixty clay exercises that form the backbone of my teaching practice; it turns out that Zoom is a great platform for improving my drawing skills, especially when drawing monsters and mash-ups with my nephew; I learned that had I not fallen in love with clay so early in my life, I might have discovered flour instead and become a pasta chef; and while slowing down is frustrating, it is also a tremendous gift that allows for deep internal work—work that is just now beginning to materialize as a ceramic ledger of locating myself.
It’s good to remind myself that, especially for a tortoise, this is a lot of movement.
during (and enduring) the Lockdown, nicole seisler has been making essential objects for herself and for her home—And eventually for her community, too.
Nicole Seisler, mixed, wedged, rolled, cut, and sometimes pressed pasta, 2020
Nicole Seisler, Vessel for Grounding (spider plant), 2020. Ceramic,
Nicole Seisler, Vessel for Grounding (pilea), 2020. Ceramic.
Nicole Seisler, Vessel for Grounding (plumeria), 2020. Ceramic
Nicole Seisler, Ledger of Locating Myself (detail, work in progress), 2020. Ceramic