Where clay gets a chance to make a big impression

Ceramist Tony Marsh has been thinking big. As a professor in the art department at Cal State Long Beach, Marsh directs the school’s ceramics program. With kilns capable of firing mammoth-scale works and an exhibition area that replicates a commercial gallery, it has become a magnet for students and artists who want to work in new, experimental and often large ways in clay.

So when the Scripps College Ceramic Annual chose Marsh as guest curator for the 61st showing this year, he turned to six young or mid-career ceramists, all of whom have either studied, taught or currently teach at Cal State Long Beach.

With no thematic guidelines in mind “except that the work be large and ambitious,” Marsh selected David Hicks, Nina Jun, Hwa-Jin Lee, Kristen Morgin, Vince Palacios and Sun-Koo Yuh. They produced all of the show’s pieces at Long Beach.

“What unifies these artists is their enormous energy and resourcefulness,” Marsh says. “They also share an almost devotional internal belief in what they are doing, even though there may be no external rewards, such as a market for such large-scale work, at the end of the rainbow.”

Mary MacNaughton, who directs Scripps’ Ruth Chandler Williamson Gallery, where the exhibition is on view, says “each artist in this year’s annual pushes the limits of working in clay in interesting ways.”

Since 1945, the show, which is billed as the oldest running annual ceramics exhibition in the United States, has chronicled ceramics’ evolution.

Though it has featured artists from around the world, it has not ignored California art history -- especially during the early 1950s, when artists such as Peter Voulkos, Paul Soldner, John Mason and Susan Peterson led a Southern California-based revolution in clay that expanded ceramics from a crafts medium into the realm of fine art and sculpture. All have exhibited in different annuals.

Since its inception, the Scripps ceramic annual has been an “artist’s choice” exhibition, meaning that prominent ceramists have served as the shows’ curators.

Soldner, who taught for many years at Scripps College, chose the artists from 1959 until his retirement in 1991. In 1996, MacNaughton began inviting a different guest curator each year.

“We’re interested in presenting a distinctive point of view in the field of ceramics each year,” she says, “and Tony brought that to us in his proposal.”

Viewers entering the gallery will find a space transformed into a landscape of massive, technically complex clay works.

Morgin’s entry, “Hearse 2004,” is a pocked and corroding life-size sculpture of an early 1960s hearse constructed from raw clay, cement and glue and modeled over an armature of wood and wire. The piece presents the metaphor of the hearse as a vehicle for death’s spiritual journey and as a kiln-like caldron that symbolizes personal transformation and change.

Yuh’s totem pole-like structure, “Long Beach Summer,” presents a stack of glazed ceramic human heads, figurines, vases, masks and animals, and other images gleaned mostly from the Far East. It rises 139 inches off the gallery floor.

Fragments of moth-white ceramic shards, piled in a small mound and positioned in a curtained corner of the gallery, make up Jun’s piece, “The Perishable.” A slide projector superimposes a text over the jagged, delicate crevices of these slabs.

In “Eternal Love,” Lee offers a free-standing, castle-like structure of latticed ceramics, which the artist has adorned with glazed shards of pottery and sparkling splinters of mirrors.

Hicks’ “Burden of Harvest” loads a wooden raft-like base with three bundles of brightly painted ceramic goblets. Each sprouts a long wooden neck suggestive of a ship’s mast or saplings.

And for “The First 100 Years in Three Movements,” Palacios fired a glazed decal of lyrical images onto commercial tiles to create a slick-surfaced mural alluding to the history of Western art and science and nonspecific creation myths.

Gallery director MacNaughton hopes each work will be an eye-opener to the possibilities of ceramics, especially for students.

“We’re committed to making public the richness of the ceramic work being done in Southern California,” she says, “and students from Santa Barbara to San Diego come to the annual to gain insight.”

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Scripps College Ceramic Annual

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Where: Scripps College, Ruth Chandler Williamson Gallery, 11th and Columbia streets, Claremont

When: 1 to 5 p.m. Wednesdays through Sundays

Ends: April 3

Price: Free

Contact: (909) 607-4690, www.scrippscollege.edu