Exhibition Text

Nature of Things is pleased to present the exhibition, 3 Women, featuring ceramics by Gail Blank, oil paintings by Gretta Johnson, and fine ink drawings by Helen Burkhart Mayfield.

A vessel, by nature, is inherently feminine, and Gail Blank’s ceramics in subject and form are borne of the female body. The imagery that wraps around her vessels is humorous, playful, fantastical and allegorical (a lone shapely bottom, a naked woman taunting a devil with a snake, a woman slipping from the grasp of a man, or falling, bucked off a horse). The fetish figures are hollow and statuesque, resembling the oldest sculptural forms: Venus symbols of fertility. The largest vessel in the exhibition, Female with Horse, was supposedly the only ceramic that Gail Blank lived with in her home and filled with colorful fake Zinnia flowers. Blank frequently used a 17th-century style of Japanese ceramic firing technique called Raku, where a ceramic is fired at a lower heat and cooled rapidly. The two masks resemble an exaggeration of woman beyond her motherly years as a crone-like figure, aged and terrifying. All works in this exhibition come from Blank’s later, more developed style in the 1990’s; Gail Blank began making ceramics in 1971.

Gretta Johnson’s paintings are luminous and vibrant, full of kinetic movement and opposing tension. The figures in her works are represented as disembodied caricatures or fully embedded into their environment. Johnson builds up her surfaces from light to dark, leaving ghost-like images just beneath the surface, and creating the luminous glow emanating from within. Johnson is an informal student of Jungian psychology and incorporates symbolic forms from her practice and her own dreams, evoking the very transformative processes of painting itself.

Helen Burkhart Mayfield’s ink drawings from the 1970’s are a subtle sleight of hand. While the negative space has the potential to dominate her works, the delicate line holds each page with assurance. This series of drawings came from a time of psychological turbulence in Mayfield’s life. Her work as an artist throughout her life extended beyond the visual arts; Mayfield was known in the Austin arts community for her street performances, costumery, and interpretive dance troupe. The mythical bodies, animals, demons and archetypes she conveys in her drawings are graceful and full of choreographed movement. Even nature’s forms mimic a bodily form. Not enough has been recorded or truly known about Mayfield’s drawings, but we may speculate about the direct referential nature of the works themselves through biographical clues.

The work of these three women, Gail, Gretta and Helen, explores identity—as a vessel, a mask, and a morph—primarily through the female body and symbolic dream allusions. The work in this exhibition came to act harmoniously, and at times almost interchangeable in style and continuity of narrative. 

Crone welcomes you with her yellow eyes, her expectant nose, her ruddy cheeks.

The cycle begins at the end, the point where the tail has entered the mouth of the dragon.

A storm descends upon the landscape in cylindrical motions, penetrated by a resistant cattail. Death also remains; an animal skull mocks you.

The storm clears, spring arrives miraculously once again. The tree and its fingers grasping upwards, heaven-facing daisies, roots steadied in the earth. A lone cloud awaits on the horizon. Hush the winds.

The wheel of creation bursts forth, thrusting primordial stillness into cyclical motion. Tonal primaries (red, blue, yellow): the prima materia of creation.

Mother Earth! Bounteous spring brings forth nodal growth. Blood veins extend like root systems, pulsing with life.

Three more blossoms: erect, bristled, alert.

An echo pours out of the fallen vessel in shallow water, encircling her nakedness. She has awoken in the womb from a sleep that lasted 309 years. The light-body guides her to the entrance of the cave, the transformation complete, where for 309 years the sun has passed with the moon.

The floating head, hair aflame, converses with the lost highway – the entrance to the abyss. The fallen glass alembic awaits spiritual imbibement.

The siren’s wail ascends softly on the lonesome hunter: Come, come! I miss you, I miss you! Come, come! My nest is near, my nest is near! He wades into the cold river, and she, transformed into her true form, extends feathered wings, and flies off. Eros, nay, owl.

The dream-day light scorches the desert yellow earth. A combustive head falls through the sky, aflame, disturbing the bleached, still climate, and a singular topaz-eyed cloud.

Crone returns, dancing, grasping upwards towards her youthful maiden visage. The spiteful gravity of time descends, snapping at our tail.

The limp bouquet sheds two petals, the devil laughs. Only moments before, the bird, his beautiful bride. Trickster departs with the coveted branch.

A dream last night. I was on stage awash with warm light, and the velvet red curtains parted around me. My limbs were fragmented, suspended around me like a string puppet, and my body became a second stage, within it opened an emerald, green forest, with a cabin in the middle. The door was arched, and a singular light emanated from its outline. The image was held between my feet, and shaped like my head, a sleeping vessel. I awoke.

A nightmare. A face with wilted pink skin and white large lips. Her black tongue hungrily licked me like a dog. The mask falls loose,

I dissolve into vibrating pink atoms with two headlights nearing.

Ribbon-like layers without end, spiraling upwards, spiraling downwards, unraveling time. Energy, as we know it, is eternal delight.