Tony Marsh: On Growth and Form

Perforated Vessel with Attachments, 2022, earthenware, glaze, 12 H x 20 x20 inches, photo credit Tony Marsh

By GARY BREWER September 2, 2024

 “It takes a very long time to be young.”

—Pablo Picasso

Tony Marsh’s career expresses a fundamental truth about human potential and an artist’s ability to learn, grow and change. Over his 40-year career as a ceramic artist and teacher, he has transformed his work from a restrained minimalist poetry of form to expressive, powerful experiments in materiality as vehicles of unrestrained freedom.

            His early work was a conversation between two disparate aesthetic ideas: the archetypal form of the ceramic vessel, and the phenomenology of the object as expressed in Minimalism, a dominant practice in contemporary art during the 1970s and 1980s.  

            Marsh said, “I didn’t want my work connected to either utilitarian pottery or a single culturally identifiable style. I wanted my work to simply connect to archetypal form. I wanted what I made to be universal, about the idea of what ceramic vessels have been invented to do through all of cultural time everywhere: to Hold, Preserve, Offer, Commemorate, Ritualize and Beautify. So I invented vessel forms as arenas within which stories were told about basic human experiences, which happened to track my own experiences … fertility, marriage, death, creation et cetera.” 

            In his early twenties, Marsh had the honor of studying for three years in Japan as an apprentice under Living National Treasure Tatsuzo Shimaoka. This experience had a profound impact on his aesthetic and his self-awareness. The restraint in both the art of Japanese pottery and the reserved mannerisms of Japanese society fit well with his quiet, shy personality. Under Shimaoka he learned about the subjective depth that a vessel contained, how many ideas it could hold and the roles it could play in the life of a culture.

Neo-Crucible series, 2022, multiple fired, assorted clay and glaze, oxidized iron top coat, 29 1_2 H x 19 1_4 x 19 1_4 inches, photo credit Tony Marsh

            During a recent talk Marsh gave at the Orange County Museum of Contemporary Art, he recalled a story about his experience in Japan. “After I had been in Japan for about one year, I was still struggling to understand the form of a teacup. One day, an assistant of Shimaoka’s came in. He told me about the shape of the cup. He said, ‘In Japan, tea is very important. You serve it to a guest in your home to create a sense of calm and to make them comfortable and the visit more pleasant. The Japanese drink their tea scalding hot. They do not steep it; they pour boiling water into the cup with tea and serve it. There is a fear of getting burned by the scalding water; the cup, which has no handle, might slip in your fingers and spill on you. So at the top of each teacup, there is a slight outward curve. It is meant to reassure the person drinking the tea that it cannot slip through their fingers. It helps to make a person more comfortable and it reassures them.’ In that moment a whole world of meaning opened up as to how much thought and purpose goes into a simple and elegant utilitarian form. How variations in the shape of a simple object are culturally agreed upon and understood, and that thoughtful design might subliminally influence the subconscious well-being of a user. Each utilitarian ceramic object in every culture is refined to a state of perfection. It serves a specific purpose, and that purpose guides the artisans to refine it, to fulfill what it is meant to serve.”

            When Marsh left Japan he began his career as an artist. He was in a conversation with these forms, pushing back in an argument that challenged these primary structures. He tried to steer away from known utilitarian ceramic types. His work at the time was a fusion of these archetypal forms and the ideas and aesthetics of Minimalism.

            He said of his sculptures, “A universal, archetypal form vocabulary appeals to me. The forms are strong, known and clear, and on some level are the fundamental building blocks of all things physical.” 

            He felt a connection to artists such as Martin Puryear, whose Minimalist art conveyed a personal poetry through beautifully crafted sculptures that alluded to the forms of traditional tools. His sculptures’ celebration of a rich, natural materiality was an inspiration to Marsh. When he saw a retrospective of Light and Space artist James Turrell, it led Marsh to challenge the materiality of clay and inspired his Perforated Series.

            Early in his career, he created a series of sculptures titled Fertility Vessels. In these works horizontal vessels contain symbolic forms of yonis and lingams. They exude a poetic aura of sacred objects for ritual purposes. Marsh made these works to commemorate the birth of his first child. They have a deeply felt quality that expresses a universal emotion.

            In the Perforated Series, he created simple forms: small spheres and basket-like shapes or vertical cylindrical vessels. They are finished glazed, in natural clay colors. “Each object was glazed and refired four times, to slowly build surface and soften the mechanical nature of a drilled hole, like snow softens the shape of anything it falls on.”

            He meticulously perforated every inch of the entire surface, using a drill. The result dematerializes the clay body; the forms become both matter and empty space, letting light flow though the walls. The obsessive nature of this process, voiding out the clay with clean, carefully spaced holes, gives the work a strange heightened quality.

            Marsh wrote about this series, “There is something ironic about taking a material like clay, which is dense, opaque and ruled by gravity, creating eggshell-thin forms, and then removing as much material as possible, one hole at a time, light replacing mineral density. I wanted to create forms that appear to levitate. The more material I removed, the more visually intense the work became. It is addition by subtraction. I also considered them ‘Acts of Devotion’.”

 Neo-Crucible with assorted knots, 2022, multiple fired, assorted clay and glazed materials, 22 1_2 H x 23 1_2 x 23 1_2 inches, photo credit Tony Marsh
 

By 2010, Marsh was yearning for new territory to explore. He said, “ My sculpture practice has been like an interrogation. I explored the possibilities of an idea until they became exhausted. I felt that if I did not make a change, I would start making copies of my own work.”

            Marsh’s mother was an important influence on his life as an artist. She was a ballet dancer with the American Ballet Theater and performed in Broadway musicals in New York. Afterwards, she spent her life as a painter, carefully drawing and painting portraits and other subjects. Around the time that Marsh was questioning his own work, his mother, who had been diagnosed with dementia, began painting over her early work. Bold abstract patterns emerged. Brilliant colors and loose, freely painted passages covered the earlier carefully crafted images. Marsh commented, “Though it was painful watching my mother’s decline, to see how this shift in her brain freed her creative impulse was inspiring. She abandoned the control of her early work and acted with an unrestrained impulsive intuition. It affected me deeply and influenced how my recent body of work has developed.”

            Marsh’s early work exhibited a profound understanding of the history of ceramic form and craft protocols, in highly refined sculptures that created an aura of mystery. To see his journey from the rarefied beauty and precision of these works, finished in natural clay colors, to his recent sculptures that explode in bold colors and forms, is exhilarating. Embracing the unpredictable, he revels in these rich chromatic experiments of surface and color. His evolution as an artist is an act of great beauty and spiritual force.

            For these new works, Marsh uses the vessel as an armature for the phenomenological qualities of glaze, exploiting the medium’s primal, geological and expressive potential. “After years of working within such a controlled manner, it is exhilarating to push the materials as far as I can. I fire these pieces as many as 10 times. Many of them fail, becoming too brittle after so much thermal adversity. I contain and fire large volumes of mineral concoctions. When they are fired and cooled, this creates pure blocks of glaze. I break them up with a hammer and then build form by attaching the fragments onto the surface of cylindrical forms and refiring them. It is exciting to build form with glaze and not clay. Or I pour it in pools to create fluid ribbons of color swirls and then affix them to the surface of a vessel. After several firings, I completely lose sight of any plan or design. It is liberating and exciting to be working in this experimental process.”

            These are powerful physical objects. Their usefulness as a vessel has been usurped by the volcanic pours and craggy surfaces. The glaze itself is physical: chunks and blocks bejewel the craggy surfaces of his vessels like lava flows. They are organic and architectonic, eccentric and beautiful. His rich palette is in stark contrast to the natural colors of his earlier work.

            He showed me one tall conical piece where pours of rich, colorful glazes streamed down the sides, mixing and flowing into each other. He said that when it first came out of the kiln, it was hard to accept it. “I felt embarrassed. It was like the circus had come to town! But I decided to not judge it, to just push forward. I was driven by observing and acting on material behavior, general curiosity, the magic of alchemy and an attitude of wanting to disrupt ceramic craft protocols and operate experimentally in the unknown.”

            It will be exciting to see where this new expressive freedom in his art will carry him. In the creative life of an artist one can continue to grow and develop, to free onseself from the cultural trends that limited what they thought was possible when they were young. Indeed, with Tony Marsh, his new work seems to exude a youthful freedom, an energy and power that flows from the Earth itself. The primordial fire and unlimited malleability of his medium have unleashed a beautiful late body of work, in which one can feel a new beginning. WM