Carol Gouthro Gardener of Technical

Carol Gouthro

Gardener of Technical Delights

While Carol Gouthro has worked in more prosaic dinnerware formats, she is best known for the organic exuberance of her handbuilt vessel production, in which closely observed botanical characteristics taken from the Washington State forest gardens she loves mingle with geometric forms to evolve new, somewhat oversized one- to two-foot hybrid ceramic-vegetable entities not found in nature. The results are compelling to the eye (her surfaces are painstakingly finished and generally richly chromatic), satisfyingly textured, and conceptually evocative, occupying a dreamlike middle ground somewhere between fairy tales of childhood and the emerging recombinant genetic landscapes of tomorrow. For this combination of immediate technical delight and iconographic interest, I believe her work is worth more sustained investigation.

Gouthro's primary influences derive from nature itself and secondarily from nature illustration and photography. As she notes in her current statement, she finds great interest in "the complexity, diversity, beauty, and danger of the natural world, especially plant forms" (Gouthro 1). For her, the vegetable universe -- the forest in itself -- is closely associated with ideas of seasonal transience, mortality and fecundity, the cycle of sex and decay. Nourishment and maturation are also persistent and perhaps increasing concerns; obeying vegetable logic, the fruit-bearing forms of the "Ripe" series (2008-present) have recently emerged as the natural successors to earlier, more exclusively floral work like the "Floris" and petite "Demoiselles" that first intimated her mature style.

These works begin as relatively abstract compound vessel constructions, but like an indulgent gardener, Gouthro invites her vegetable forms to envelop, obscure, and ultimately transform the sterile clay shells. Goblets voluptuously blossom into life, echoing the complexity of Baroque appropriations of floral exuberance as decorative technique. Gouthro is conscious of the erotic symbolism at work here; as she notes, she associates the vessel form itself with potentialities: "human as vessel, container of life; vessel as ovary, source of nourishment" (Gouthro 1). Transforming the vessel-as-egg into a flower-as-ovary allows her to subvert distinctions between mineral, architectural, animal, human, and vegetable worlds -- in effect, tearing down the categorical walls within nature.

However, this triumph of nature is not a simple effacement of the civilized world. Traces of the architectural persist throughout Gouthro's sculptural output, but the stacked discs and other geometric elements that emerge out of more explicitly floral passages seem less like intrusive threatening intrusions and more like reiterations of vegetable themes transposed into a more abstract mode. For Gouthro, menace, like true fecundity, is reserved for nature -- her imaginary roses come with painstakingly sculpted and finished thorns -- while stricter geometries appear to exist solely to create structural support and formal pleasure.

In this benign fusion of geometry and botany, ceramic and organic forms, it would be easy to attribute Gouthro's work to the tradition of visionary art. Her riotous use of intense oranges, pale blues, and rich reds harks backward not only to fauvist and Pop celebrations of color for its own sake but to the jeweled palettes of late medieval painters like Hieronymus Bosch, while the resemblance between Gouthro's hybrid forms and those with which Bosch populated Eden is even more striking. A grove of Gouthro's half-crystalline plants would not be out of place in the Garden of Earthly Delights, and arguably could not have existed in any other natural environment.

Gouthro's fantastic botany also reminds us that the "natural environment" itself is a relatively recent cultural invention, and that the boundaries between animal, vegetable, and mineral are actually more permeable than we may commonly believe. Her acquaintance with the classics of floral illustration is abiding and deep; for example, in a 2007 profile (Wagonfeld 48), she named Karl Blossfeldt's photographic plant studies as a primary influence. If she is familiar with Blossfeldt's epochal Art Forms in Nature, she may be a student of Ernst Haeckel's similarly titled investigation of the quasi-geometric, quasi-organic microbial univeral, or of the "wonder cabinet" juxtaposition of nature with art that spawned the visions of illustrators like Albertus Seba, Maria Sibylla Merian, and, more recently, Leo Lionni's arresting Parallel Botany.

Lionni's hybrid plant forms sometimes demonstrate something of the quality of a nightmare. Gouthro's are more dreamlike in conception, and even their thorns and other occasional sharp edges are more likely to produce shudders of whimsy (erotic or otherwise) than outright menace. These are not the carnivorous plants through which the erotic "Venus" of nature traps and digests her animal prey. Instead, Gouthro is a self-described "optimist" (Gouthro 1) who takes deliberate care to balance the "edgy" elements in her garden by incorporating fairy-tale associations into her pieces:

I often include found-object components that have strong nostalgic childhood associations for me, e.g. The swan, the toy jack, the little bird from Snow White, a jello mold. These are very benign, safe, warm associations that speak to memory and they balance some of the more edgy, menacing, sharp and thorny parts of the work.

These incorporations often become part of the "architectural" elements of her sculpture. The balls and prongs of the "toy jack," for example, emerge as the spine of Floris 1, while the "jello mold" plays a recurring role as a base. In this way, childhood literally grounds what could otherwise become a monstrous apprehension of "Nature, red in tooth and claw."

Regardless of these imbedded iconographic concerns, Gouthro is ultimately more concerned with surface than in symbol, and it is in the surfaces that her work demonstrates both immediate charm and technical achievement the various "organs" of her fantastic vegetables are intricately textured, pierced, and pitted to enhance the illusion that these objects evolved organically. She is a specialist in advanced glazing and other ceramic coloring techniques, and in fact her notes on surface design have been incorporated into the American Ceramics Society's textbook on that subject (Turner 125-127). Texture and color commingle in her process; she is most famous in the field for using glaze -- normally a coloring element -- sculpturally to create glistening droplets that evoke what Gouthro calls "dew" but may also represent juice, nectar, or some other erotic fluid.