Reproduced with the kind permission of the Summer 2006 of World Sculpture News.

Ceramics Redefining Sculpture

Contemporary sculpture is no longer defined by works realized in a few media such as metal and wood. More and more often such media as clay and glass are being used to realize new sculptural ideas. The art of Singaporean ceramicist Jessie Lim, for example, transcends the traditional boundaries of functional ware' associated with pottery. Her ambiguous quasi-organic forms speak more with the vocabulary of contemporary art, leaving one to question: Are they ceramics, sculptures, or installation?

By Gina Fairley

Jessie Lim began making pots in 1982. Like the trajectory that most ceramicists take, her journey started with functional ware. When her husband received a scholarship to study in the United States, Lim enrolled in a pottery workshop at Dartmouth College, in Hanover, New Hampshire. Her talent flourished, and with subsequent courses in New York and at the Rhode Island School of Design, her 'typical studio ware' began to take on a not-so-typical character.

Lim became fascinated with glazes in the early days of her studies. It was the breadth of expression and the sometimes unpredictable nature of the glazes that energized Lim. This vitality of surface-the skin of the pot-has been a constant in Lim's works since her first exhibition in 1983. Over the past two decades, her early layering and trailing of glazes has evolved to draw exclusively upon the infinite, and subtle range of matt blacks and whites- signature to her contemporary spires and orbs. What Lim has achieved is that mature balance between form and surface.

In the early 1990s, Lim turned to hand-built pots-a move that would lead to her sculptural forms and installation work. A workshop at the Anderson Ranch Arts Center, in Colorado, in 1993, where she worked with potters Paul Soldner and Victor Babu, proved to be a turning point. Here Lim was inducted into the philosophy of "testing the limits of the material" by intentionally "spoiling" what is already "perfect," pioneered by the distinguished Austrian-British potter Lucie Rie (1902-1995) in the 1950s. It was also where Lim began to find a connection with the landscape, which would later dominate her forms. And, on her return, it was an encounter with the sculptor Ng Eng Teng, who encouraged Lim to turn to sculpture, which allowed her to emerge from more than a decade of functional ware that had flirted with the 'experimental.'

When one encounters an installation of Jessie Lim's ceramic forms, it is a fantasy world reminiscent of a cluster of blooms under a microscope, a constellation, or a coral seascape that we conjure, rather than a pedigree pointing to Japanese or Chinese ceramic traditions. These clustered forms engage in a spatial tension, at once repelling with their thorn-encrusted spires and urchin-like needles, yet deliciously sensual and provocative in their stillness.

How can a form with so many anomalies grasp such purity? It is this dichotomy that creates their tension and their strength: grounded orbs with lofty spires; spiraling movement contrasting quiet serenity; earthy natural forms and the totemic or spiritual, black and white-yin and yang. But Lim's is not an aesthetic rooted in Asian philosophies. How could those shards and needles possibly adhere to the teachings of feng shui?

The complexity of the work is not echoed in the artist. When asked of this tension, what has been described as "aggressive forms and textures," Lim is ambivalent. She sees them as echoing nature, or embodying the contemporary. "When I am making my work, I am thinking I would like this piece to look like it is moving, or to look very strong or sturdy. I don't refer to a form in my mind, but rather I am trying to transport a feeling or spirit in the work-for it to have a presence."

It is undeniable that these sculptures have a strong physical presence and engagement with the viewer. Ceramics with khutspe! They demand an amount of 'breathing space' between the individual objects, and yet, at the same time, Lim's ceramics work wonderfully in clusters or clans. This is perhaps where they transcend their medium, taking on a more layered and spatial reading as installations. And, like installation or conceptual art, the layered experience of Lim's work goes beyond the mere physical space of the object to a psychological or emotional space. For example, her Stars and Pines could be likened to those of a porcupine, a puffer fish, or even a mine, emphatically stating a boundary or territory to an encroaching visitor: at once both beautiful and dangerous. It is a cerebral as well as an emotional reading.

It is this constant push and pull that sets a certain rhythm or pace as we move through Lim's floor installations or along a table of forms. The eye is pulled up by the spires, and then pushed down by the weight of her earthy orbs. The word weight comes up repeatedly when describing the work of Jessie Lim. These pieces don't scream fragile like so many ceramics with their flighty delicacy. They are solid without being bulky. Clearly conscious of the concept of weight, Lim says, "I want my work to look strong. Some people tell me,' your work is neither feminine nor masculine-you don't know who made it.' I like that. I like that they are able to stand on their own. I try to do that. I aim to do that. That means the piece says to me, 'I exist'."

It is the same as that physical engagement we have with large-scale sculpture. You are forced to move around it and look at it from different angles, its scale engaging with a human scale. It is this sculptural sensibility and spatial dynamism that encourages Lim's work to be read as installations rather than as the work of a potter-clearly placing it within the specter of contemporary art.

Lim's installations have been photographed from above, seen as a guest would encounter her work overlooking a hotel lobby, such as her installation at the Landaa, part of the Four Seasons Group in the Maldives. Hovering on a glass platform, this cluster of spires and orbs is one of four installations Lim was commissioned to do for the new hotel due to open in October 2006 along with an installation of 'sea-urchin' pieces, appropriately in the Landaa's Reef Club, and two exterior installations at the Kuda Huraa hotel, one a flotilla of spires in a shallow pool of water and the other in the Japanese Zen tradition of a raked bed of sand. These are some of the largest and most technically adroit forms Lim has complete, the Spires measuring up to five-feet tall and casting wonderful reflections on the pool, They offer a kind of surreal landscape and beckon contemplation.

Lim's works seem to fit well in any setting. Chameleon-like, they take on associations of their environment; a seascape, a grove of pine trees, hip urban retro design not dissimilar to a Neilson lamp, or the lines and marks of a Brice Marden painting, an artist Lim respects greatly. It is easy to observe how Lim's work sits comfortably beside that of other contemporary artists, such as the palpable prints of Lim Joo Hong, the minimal still lifes of Margot Wilburd, or the abstract paintings of Milenko Prvacki, as observed at Taksu Gallery. There is sympathy of spirit, and yet, Lim's forms remain quiet, individual with their own vocabulary of marks and expression.

Like the double row of matt-glazed black and white Wavy Bowls in Lim's last exhibition at Taksu Kuala Lumpur (2005), they fit within the context of a contemporary art environment. Lim has not entirely abandoned her roots in functional ware, though her bowls have taken on a sculptural quality. Just as the wavy, disorientating balance of these fine bowls echo the wavy lines that spiral their way up Lim's orbs and spires, they have a simpatico with Marden's ribbon lines and Lim Joo Hong's bleeding ink spheres. These are clearly not two groups of work by Lim-functional and sculptural-but one. Perhaps this harks back to Lim's time at Anderson Ranch and the early influence of Lucie Rie with the mantra to 'spoiling the perfect.' Lim intuitively uses asymmetry, or 'imperfection,' by choosing a hand-built technique for most of her work over the wheel, allowing the sense of hand, or the organic, to be maintained. Just as black balances white in these rows of bowls, their slick glazes balance their wonky form.

Lim's practice as a potter started with the desire to experiment with glazes. Over the past two decades, although the work has changed form, this intuitive playfulness of experimenting with the surface, or epidermis of the pot, has remained at the core of Lim's art-making. We see it in the 'rips' added on to her hand-built pots, like 'character-lines' or a sinewy vine embracing the form, and we see it in the textures that sit beneath the surface-elements that add to the abstraction of the work. It is these textures that keep them connected to an organic form- roughly pitted like a piece of coral, or grainy like sandstone. In some works, the iron bleeds through giving mottled brownish spots and the effect of stone. Similarly, Lim matt black glazes have been mistaken for metal with their oily sheen.

What is unmistakable, however, is their ode to a minimalist aesthetic. "I see so much color in black and white. I don't see it as a restriction. It is just deliciously pure", she says. Lim has managed to allude to the organic without being overtly earthy, as in a craft tradition. She has been able to traverse genres - from one of expression, to abstraction, to minimalism - at once exotic and familiar. It is easy to think of Lim's works as exotic, and as a Westerner, Asia is exotic. They oscillate at the edge between the beautiful and the ugly, an experience we often encounter in cultures that we deem 'exotic' which are somewhat closer to a raw reality. And yet, Lim's forms look modern and carry the slick aesthetics of design. They're enigmatic.

We have not seen the last of Jessie Lim's ambiguous orbs and spires. They beguile us with an emotional voltage. She is clearly an adroit technician and a mature artist with a contemporary vision. It could be said that Jessie Lim is reinterpreting our definitions of installation.