Margaret Realica at Plinth

Summer Strawberry by Margaret RealicaThe first impression you might have when you enter the immaculate Plinth Gallery to see Margaret Realica's exquisite porcelain and mixed media creations is that you have stumbled into an airport for tiny flying saucers, each sitting on its own platform awaiting refueling or repair.  Most are more or less the size of softballs, perhaps circled by translucent rings or nestled in conical forms, with wires wiggling out, like vines seeking the sun, or looping around the object to connect mysterious electrical or mechanical doodads.  The more rectilinear ones make you look for a switch to see what it will do when turned on, but there is no switch.  You have to create your own fantasy about its purpose.

Then you realize, as you admire each for its elegant finish and the meticulous craftsmanship that went into it and the interplay of components you would think of as incommensurate, that you are in the presence of some Comic Spirit.  These objects suggest teapots!  If Paul Klee or Joan Miro had teapots, they might look like these. Or if a teapot was sent off into the universe eons ago and went through countless alien civilizations, it might come back to earth looking like this.

Many ceramic artists love mimicry and whimsy (I think it comes with the medium), but Margaret Realica is one of the wittiest and most playful I've ever seen.  She appears to ask herself, "How far away can I get from representing a teapot, yet still present the formal essence of one?" And, "What disparate and totally un-teapot-like materials can I combine, yet still capture the feelings and associations of teapot-ness?"  This show (you can also visit mrealica.com, and plinthgallery.com for photos) is the answer.  The challenge she tackles is even greater when you consider that the Teapot  is one of the Big Clichés of ceramics (who hasn't made a teapot?), and greater still, when you consider the history of the Tea Pot and all the associations we commonly make to it.  It's an ancient form that has worked its way through culture after culture since the 4th century, symbolizing here hospitality, there peace; at one time conjuring up a luxury reserved for emperors and queens, at other times, evoking a simple peasant pleasure at the end of a back-breaking day.  Only water exceeds the amount of tea that is consumed around the world.  The Tea Pot is one of those great marriages of Beauty and Utility, and one of those rare forms that engages all  senses at once: vision (sensuous and maternal curves, heavenly porcelains and precious metals), hearing (the rumbling boil, the whistle, the pouring splash, the slurp), touch (hot on the lips and in the belly), smell (the entire herbal spectrum), and taste (from sweet to bitter and everything in between).  Like other great human pleasures, tea drinking requires a certain amount of anticipation and waiting, of letting things steep, if you will; it's done slowly; every sip is savored. Elaborate rituals have developed around it, ceremonies and whole etiquettes (do you curl your pinky when sipping?).

Margaret Realica knows all this of course, and has not been intimidated by the challenge.  She contributes something new to a venerable tradition, which is what Master artists like her are supposed to do.  Her  confabulations of porcelain, wire, brass, plexiglass, plastic tubing, acrylic drawings and photo-transparencies, gears, found objects, and electrical devices--none of which, except porcelain, is associated with tea or teapots-- all assembled with meticulous care and mischievous cunning-- are eloquent, funny, endearing and important.  They get into your head and steep there, urging you, weeks later, to come back and have another sweet sip.

Rex Brown
Pattern Shop Studio