Walter Mc Connell - Unfired Clay Installations

Unfired Clay Installations

McConnell’s unfired installations typically feature scenes reminiscent of an imagined natural world, rich in their own fecundity. All manner of flora abound within the spaces he creates. The individual forms from which the scenes are assembled vary in their rendering. In a single environment, McConnell may display forms that are directly reminiscent of natural vegetation, “meaty succulents, low lying flowers, ferns, and the like,” while simultaneously providing more abstracted forms – some of which would best be described as fecal. In many instances, McConnell also juxtaposes these elements with kitsch imagery, such as garden bunnies or the figure of Snow White. This mass of natural and manipulated imagery, at times rendered with up to 2000 pounds of raw terra cotta, typically resides within a thin plastic enclosure extending toward the ceiling. Within the terrarium-like environments a single light illuminates the raw clay within, creating a space moist from condensation emanating from the unfired clay.

Jeanne Quinn describes the experience of standing in front of these works: “In McConnell’s constructions, he perfectly creates the idea of the walled garden, of the desired place that cannot be entered. …with its translucent veil of plastic that contains all the sensuality of the wet, sculpted clay, we cannot quite see what is within. A mist of droplets, of evaporated water, a seemingly ephemeral, insignificant screen, prevents us from seeing the interior.”

Interpretations of these works are varied. Mitchell Merback writes of McConnell’s unfired works, “On the one hand we have real-time systems that exist in a space that is frankly architectural. When activated by light and heat, the changing biosphere also references the duration of our encounter with it. …they are concrete and real. …On the other hand, we have an artist determined to expose what is perhaps the key cultural precondition of today’s ecological depredations: not merely the alienation of culture from nature, but the displacement of nature by its cultural representation.” Merback continues, “It is no longer the old lamentable case of our being estranged from what is real in nature, but that the real has been driven to extinction by its ever-widening simulation.”