BmoreArt

Certainly, there is a recognizably modernist dimension to the project. It calls to mind, for instance, Robert Morris’ cunning 1961 Box with the Sound of Its Making: a wooden box that contains a recording of Morris hammering, sawing, and sanding the same box. Like Morris, Pon-Cooper’s work calls attention to the labor which produced it, and emphasizes process and duration. But her work also recalls the Minimalists’ interest in repetition, and Donald Judd’s celebration of “continuity, one things after another.” It evokes, too, Eva Hesse’s commitment to repetition as a means of effecting transformation. Pon-Cooper’s work rests, in a theoretical sense, on such precedents.

But it also builds upon them in compelling ways. Critically, Pon-Cooper shows no interest in the modernist principle of medium specificity. If anything, her installation intentionally troubles the traditional lines between disciplines and media. “I was trying,” she explains, “to incorporate more of my drawing practice into my ceramic practice.” Intriguingly, she did that in part by turning to digital tools and media. The illustrations of her hands were based upon a video that she took of herself at work; she isolated certain images and transferred them to the dishes with the aid of Adobe Premier and the rotoscoping function in Procreate. Once she had completed the series of plates, she stitched photographs of them into a further video: a seven-second compilation that played as part of the show, and that brings the process of making back to a sort of flickering, animated life.

So the fluid motions of the potter intermingle, here, with the illusory motion of stop action photography. As Weiss pointed out to me, moreover, various temporal rhythms also co-exist: the gradual shaping of each vessel; the precisely timed firings of batches of vessels; the rapid, distilled pace of the video. And then, too, there is the experience of the viewer. Pon-Cooper intentionally installed the series of plates so that they wrap around the entire room, rather like the sequenced pictures in an early zoetrope. Motion, or at least the impression of motion, thus encircles us.

Importantly, though, the work doesn’t only impress on a conceptual level. The individual plates can also charm. Working with two-pound batches of porcelaneous stoneware flecked with iron impurities, Pon-Cooper stretched the forms until they were on the verge of collapsing. She then incised them, bisque fired them, went over the designs with a red iron oxide, and fired the vessels a final time, in a salt kiln. The goal, then, was never absolute consistency. Rather, the forms of the hand-thrown plates vary slightly, and the iron and the salt produced a range of unpredictable but intriguing local effects, including red flashing and small irregular blotches.

In one of my favorite plates, the artist’s hands, rendered in dark, hatched tones, reach in from the right, and work an implied mass of clay. Drawn in what Pon-Cooper calls an academic, observational style, the hands are at once assertive and modest; they fill only a small fraction of the surface of the plate, but seem to act confidently and efficiently. The center of the plate is, for the most part, a creamy off-white, but nearer the rim a peachy blush predominates. And throughout, a few speckles appear irregularly: the traces of grains of salt, evoking the lovely spotting of a salmon, or a night sky sprent with stars.

The vessels are thus the outcome of a productive combination of control and the abdication of control. They’re also, you might say, a wry twist on Yayoi Kusama’s claim that “we, not the machine, should be in control”—here, control is merely nominal, and always only partial. Always, though, there is an abiding respect for the materials and the processes of pottery. In this sense, I found myself recalling Simone Leigh’s installation at the 2022 Venice Biennale, which combined a series of elegantly executed salt-glazed porcelain forms with a video that focused, at times, on her hands working bodies of clay. For Pon-Cooper, likewise, dedicated craftsmanship can accommodate the active, volatile agency of minerals and fire.

It can also yield a degree of comfort. At least, that’s a word that comes up repeatedly when Pon-Cooper speaks of her project. She admits that the scale of the project seemed decadent: it felt, she recalls, “almost indulgent to do the same thing over and over again.” But the repetitive labor—seventy identical forms, each thrown on a wheel until her muscles had simply internalized the task—proved surprisingly soothing. Occasionally, even the intense pace of work came to feel meaningfully circular. At several moments, she found herself incising vessels as their finished counterparts were baking in the kiln. In, out; heat, cool: a sort of processual wheel emerges, anticipating and echoing the eventual form of the installation.

And why, you might ask, seventy plates? According to Pon-Cooper, the number was dictated by practical concerns: a manageable body of work that, when photographed, would yield a satisfying video. But it seems notable that the number seventy suggests, in several cultures, wholeness or completeness. The number recurs in the Torah, where it often suggests totality, and seventy years constitute, in Jewish thought, a full lifetime. In Islam, seventy can connote an infinite amount, or the idea of fullness. The seventy plates on the wall, then, quietly suggest a unified group, a reached end, and the fulfillment of an aim.

Staged in a small gallery in an academic building, Pon-Cooper’s show had a relatively low profile; it came and went with little fanfare. Nevertheless, a small guest book on a platform near the entrance featured dozens of encouraging remarks and adoring praise. Sometimes unusually polished bodies of work emerge in unexpected places: potent gems come to light in a landscape you thought you knew. And, when they do, your sense of what is possible in that landscape may be altered.