­­­­Other/Worldliness: Judd Schiffman’s Mothman in the Bardo

Judd Schiffman, “Bardo of This Life,” 2024

By IRIS CUSHING November 10, 2024

To spend time in the presence of ceramic artist Judd Schiffman’s intricate, intimate pieces is to think about both earth (clay, soil, the heaviness of raw material) and planet Earth, the terrestrial plane we all, at least momentarily, inhabit. In the work for his exhibition Mothman in the Bardo, on view at Emerson Dorsch in Miami, Schiffman harnesses his dazzling physical sensibility with clay as a means of rendering his own Earth-bound cosmogony. The artist is nothing if not a world-builder, creating in dialogue with a host of other world-building entities: figures from American and Japanese folklore, cryptozoology, Buddhist and Jewish spiritual traditions, and speculative fiction, to name a few.

The show centers around the figure of Mothman, a mythical half-man, half-moth creature from West Virginia whom the artist has appointed as a surrogate for himself. Schiffman encountered a statue of Mothman (which he described as “dumpy and cute”) at the International Cryptozoology Museum in Portland, Maine. He was taken with the figure, with its oblong, weary eyes and feathery antennae, and upon returning to his studio in his native Providence, decided to re-envision Mothman as a kind of promethean searcher. The ceramic medium, it turns out, is uniquely suited to Mothman’s (and the artist’s) quest.

In this body of work, Mothman becomes a shamanic character, positioned in dynamic motion between the natural and human worlds, on a journey between life, death and rebirth. The exhibition features a series of six “Bardo” pieces, mounted on pedestals in a circle at the center of the gallery space. Each Bardo sculpture makes its own complex narrative, representing one of the Buddhist bardos, or intermediary spaces of existence. “Bardo of this Life” finds Mothman contorted into a yogic posture, holding his long face in one hand as he sheds a golden tear at the sight of crimson toadstools growing around his body. Cubes suggesting quartz or amethyst crystals crop out of the gaps between his limbs; he grasps a burning candle in his other outstretched hand, while a small golden planet resembling Saturn is pressed into the sole of one foot. The layers of symbolism—dense and resonant as a picture on an ancient Tarot card—are matched by the detail and candor Schiffman brings to his handmade universes.

Installation View, Judd Schiffman, Mothman in the Bardo at Emerson Dorsch in Miami, FL

Surrounding the dense tableaus of Mothman’s bardos are several wall-mounted frescoes, pieces which seem to leap off the wall into communion with their free-standing counterparts. These spaces reveal Mothman’s fluency with the nonhuman world by way of his connections with animals. In “Ritual for Healing,” Mothman sits side-straddle atop a blue-faced llama, contemplating a burning candle on its back, light reflecting in the gold pools of his eyes.

“Heir to the Glimmering World,” 2024

In “Heir to the Glimmering World,”—which takes its title from a 2004 Cynthia Ozick novel— Mothman gazes downward at a mask of his own face as he’s being watched by an enormous skunk whose body is covered with eyes. The skunk, an animal traditionally associated with attention, is surrounded by a lively border of smaller skunks, as well as butterflies, glowing candles, and birds. Schiffman has described these wall pieces as “paintings,” and they are indeed painting-like in the sense that they appear to continue past their borders; one gets the sense of seeing a glimpse of a much larger narrative, a moment in an epic that must be taken in one piece at a time.

“Ritual for Healing,” 2024

Schiffman has described his ceramic pieces as being alive. He’s noted his own role in making the work as being one of midwife or conduit, a position of mediumship with distinctly mystical valences. Being with the work in Mothman in the Bardo, it’s easy to pick up on this quality of aliveness, which comes through strongly in the medium of clay, a substance which is held, pressed, twisted, pinched, glazed, fired, and carried carefully from one place to another. Schiffman’s vocabulary of color and gesture owes a lot to twentieth-century pioneers like Betty Woodman and Viola Frey; Schiffman’s sense of humor and tenderness also puts one in mind of Robert Arneson and the California Funk Art movement of the 1960s and 1970s. But the way that this artist weaves together his own singular network of influences—from the worlds of Octavia Butler and Herman Hesse to animal symbolism to his own ongoing inquiry into masculine archetypes—that, along with the aliveness of his subjects, makes this a world-building body of work all Schiffman’s own. WM