Trial By Fire presents the works of eight artists from the RISD ceramics MFA program. Tied to each other through not only their shared medium of ceramics, but also their experiences working and growing together amidst a two-year program, the students in this exhibition push against the thresholds of their chosen medium through experiments in method and material as well as explorations of identity and personhood.
As demonstrated by the works on display, ceramics, as a medium, is one fundamentally marked by an expansiveness in material and conceptual possibilities. Although the artistic revolutions of the mid 20th century have led to a radical fluidity across all mediums and traditions, ceramics, arguably, have always operated within this vein—at times functioning as statues, offerings, and surfaces for image making, as well as enquiries into materiality itself. It is a medium between worlds. Like sculpture, it can occupy space in a phenomenologically charged manner, heightening our own corporeal self-awareness, like painting, it indexes the movements of the body, and like the best of conceptual art practices, can think beyond itself. The practices in this show are indicators of this range, pushing the boundaries of the medium, while calling upon the porous (and often interrelated) categories of nature, the body, and identity.
