A Massachusetts Exhibition Has Clay in Spades

Works from eight ceramic artists comprise MORE CLAY!, an exhibition of multiples at the Fuller Craft Museum.

By Kate Schuler
April 15, 2o26

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Ceramics

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Photo courtesy of Walter McConnell

Walter McConnell, A Theory of Everything: Odd Lot Ancestries, 2022, cast porcelain, iridescent luster overglaze, plywood, 8 x 10 ft.

In MORE CLAY! The Power of Repetition, an exhibition now on view at the Fuller Craft Museum featuring large works of ceramic sculpture assembled from small parts, the independent curator proves the opposite is true.

“Repetition is a strategy to achieve ambitious scale in clay,” Cross says. But it’s not only a technique for building. Repetition amplifies an artist’s message. “The language of repetition and multiples—gathering, bringing together, uniting—articulates the sensibility of these works and the goals of this exhibition.”

The exhibition includes Bean Finneran’s earthenware sculpture Orange Ring, which evokes repetition in the natural world. The seven-foot-wide piece sits on the floor at the center of the gallery. It recalls a bird’s nest—assembled on site, Finneran layered more than 10,000 small hand-rolled glazed clay spindles into a ring on the floor.

The meditative, repetitive nature of Finneran’s process, however, should not be read as quiet. The sheer mass of individual parts and their bright orange hue evince the passion and intensity of the work. Cross believes the skill, time, and devotion each piece requires adds up to art that is both inspiring and profound. “Repeating small gestures over a sustained period of time is the template for all ambitious achievements,” she says.

Photo by Max Mackenzie

Bean Finneran, Orange Ring, 2022, earthenware, glaze, acrylic stain, 1 x 8 x 8 ft.

Photo courtesy of Vanessa Ryerse

Vanessa Ryerse, Rend and ReMember, 2022, porcelain mosaic relief on wood panels, 36 x 180 x 4 in.

“Repeating small gestures over a sustained period of time is the template for all ambitious achievements.”

— Rebecca Cross

As the only artist in the show to repurpose existing ceramic pieces, Vanessa Ryerse creates mosaics from the shards of the ubiquitous blue-and-white Willow–patterned ceramic dinnerware. Her mosaic panels bring together pieces from thousands of these plates and vessels, exported Chinese porcelainware that has been copied and reproduced in the West for centuries.

For Odd Lot Ancestries from his A Theory of Everything series, Walter McConnell stacked hundreds of luster-glazed slipcast figures into a shape reminiscent of a stupa—a domed Buddhist structure that holds sacred relics. The clay pieces include kitschy figures from pop culture, religious symbols, Ming vases, and animals that McConnell employs to explore themes of mass production, materialism, religion, and globalization. For the piece in this exhibit, he added 3D-printed models of himself and family members to the base of the monument, placing himself next to Elvis Presley and below Abraham Lincoln.

The stupa shape created by McConnell’s stacked figures illustrates another theme present in the show—a nod to the use of clay as a material used throughout history to build at architectural scale. Cross points to the 400-foot-tall Jetavanarama stupa in Sri Lanka—built with more than 93 million clay bricks in the first millennium—and the terra cotta warriors in China as markers of the power of multiples to achieve ambitious scale and meaning.

“The artists in our show are following in a long tradition of working in large multiples of clay units,” she notes. “There is a sense of flow from their repetitive actions, what I call the ‘mantra of making.’ There is a spirituality in this work.”

MORE CLAY! The Power of Repetition runs through February 7, 2027.

Photo courtesy of Walter McConnell

A detail show of McConnell's Odd Lot Ancestries shows the metallic luster glazes he used for the final firing. These glazes were originally developed in the 8th century in the Middle East.

Photo courtesy of the artist and Connersmith, Washington, DC

J.J. McCracken's Fruit for Geophages (Hunger), confronts the inequality of America's food system, 2022, slip-cast locally dug clay, vitrine, 4 x 6 x 1 ft.

Kate Schuler is a potter, writer, and editor based in Washington, DC.

Learn more about MORE CLAY! online.

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This article was made possible with support from the Windgate Foundation.

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