View Larger Image Tile, 12 inches (30 centimeters) square, cast porcelain, with sprayed china paints over stencils and handprinted decals, fired multiple times, metal frame, 2004. Made in Norway with the help of Suzanne Fagermo and Ole Lislerud.

April 8, 2007

Joyce Jablonski: An Artist’s Way of Being

by Kathleen Desmond | Read Comments (0)

“I am an artist and I pursue that way of being. I’ve always been an artist,” proclaims Joyce Jablonski, professor of art and head of the ceramics program at Central Missouri State University. Her primary attitude about artmaking is a “quest,” as she describes it, for understanding. She seeks to understand her physical, psychological and spiritual world through her artmaking. She looks into herself. She studies Jung’s views on psychic and spiritual energy in the human psyche. Philosopher Ellen Dissanayake writes, “Artmaking is about looking into yourself and finding your humanity and finding out what makes things special.” She says every culture finds a way to make things special, and this “specialness” becomes ritual and spiritual.

Fascinated by the dualities in nature, in mathematics and in words, Jablonski is thoroughly engaged by natural shapes and forms. She considers the psychological, the intellectual, the cultural and the spiritual. Her way of being is a ritual process of thinking and believing. She keeps a Joseph Campbell quote in her journal that is meaningful to her: “New metaphors emerge in a modern medium for the old universal truths.” If her work could be categorized, it would be in terms of ritual art. Process as ritual. Ritual as content.

Ritual art has been an integral part of human experience throughout history. Ritual is inextricably connected to the extraordinary, to the sacred and to the very nature of human psyche. Prehistoric shamans understood the spiritual qualities of their environment. They drew on cave walls and conducted ceremonies to evoke spirits. Contemporary ritual artists make objects and tell stories that speak to our psyche and to our soul. Ritual artists bring new meaning to ideas and objects. Ritual art currently enjoys a contemporary convergence in the artwork of Joyce Jablonski.

Jablonski questions the traditional definition of the sacred and the secular. She considers herself a modern-day shaman who examines, challenges and brings new meaning to the ordinary. Jablonski investigates her “self ” through an intuitive drive for creating works of art and addressing the value of objects beyond appearance.

An overriding function of ritual is as an interface between concepts or systems and human beings. As such, ritual makes ideas and methods visible and accessible. Ritual also can function as an interface between human beings and the natural world. Nature is seen as a model of ultimate truth and rituals are used to both educate people about that order, as well as to bring human activity into alignment with it. Sometimes ritual emphasizes objects and experiences that are intended to be more than what they might appear to be. These ritual objects and experiences transcend their limited material qualities and become extraordinary.

Ritual art comes through the hands of artists who transcend themselves, or the work itself, in the process. Transcending is the capability of being out of control in a sense, or of being a product of an extremely compulsive, fixated temperament, thinks Dennis Oppenheim. When an artist is in such a psychological state it is possible for work to assume ritualistic proportions, partly because of the psychology of the artist and partly because of the kind of latent maneuvering of the art concept as it becomes disengaged from the artist. Ritual artists are highly charged and extremely engaged.

Ontological tension between spiritual and cultural attitudes is why Jablonski went to Ghana, Africa, in 2002. Similar to when she left Ohio for graduate school in Texas years before, she found herself in a completely new environment. Everything was different; the trees, the landscape, the environment, the culture. “I wanted to figure out what the environment was all about, the cactus, the desert, the vegetation, the ocean.” The history of artmaking ideas and processes with clay are in Africa for Jablonski.

She thinks of flowers not only as symbols, but as natural things in another context. The flowers are not just flowers or the formal flower shape, they are expressive and geometric, bilateral, biomorphic and anthropomorphic shapes. Meaning comes from a flower, a cowrie shell or the palm of the hand in Jablonski’s work. She wants to add other organs to her organ series like brains and ovaries/pods. She wants to take the poetic intimate nature of these objects and put them in a different context that reinterprets their meaning (e.g. heart/passion/life, ovary/female/reproduction/sexuality).

“Object, notion, idea, material.” Jablonski loves the poetic rhythms and patterns of words and music and colors and textures in visual art and in science. She likes to make up words for the pure joy of the rhythms and patterns. When she works with the rhythm or a pattern, or the patterning of a shape, it becomes more of a voice. It becomes the process of making things, repeated images and patterns. “Artmaking is basically spiritual for me,” says Jablonski.

Jablonski thinks music, mathematics, numbers, genetic code and art all have parallel meanings. She actively engages in creating patterns and rhythms and she believes in the repetition of random numbers to obtain individuality. Her influences are multitudinous. She delights in the large drawings she is making. She is engaged in the energy of each little mark. Each little mark can be added to another mark. She challenges herself to use different materials so she can find the genuine beauty in each material, in each new dimension. For a long time she only used black and white. “Line, shape and movement are a challenge with just black and white,” she says. They become a pattern, a rhythm, a process, a ritual. She created stamps of flowers with their “ovaries showing” to incorporate in her formal graphite drawings. “The abstraction becomes primary,” she explains. “It is not about making something representational. It’s about good design, about how you walk through a drawing, how you enter and exit a drawing, and what attracts you.”

Jablonski thinks of her drawings in terms of formal mark-making investigations. Both her printmaking and drawing have influenced a series of tiles made in Norway at the Porsgrund Porcelain Factory with artists Ole Lislerud and Suzanne Fagermo. Fagermo helped Jablonski design and pull 450 sheets of color-separated decals. Since then, she still investigates this process because she thinks her two dimensional work influences her three-dimensional work and vice versa. She found this process refreshing and considered it a new and challenging investigation.

I’ve heard Jablonski speak about the rhythm of the process of working with clay. She explains both practical and theoretical issues surrounding art making. She explains that it is important to control the shape of the clay. When she works with clay, it is as though she possesses it. She demonstrates such concentration and focus that it is an aesthetic experience just watching her. With such control and concentration she is able to lose control—to transcend—the clay, herself and any work she creates. Jablonski’s ability to work with clay with such competence and passion, gives evidence to the quality of her attitude and her own work. Working with the process of artmaking with clay is as much the art as the objects she makes.

After a May 2004 fire in which six years of her work was destroyed, Jablonski engaged in the creative, spiritual and intellectual quest to create new work for her one-woman exhibition last winter at the Daum Museum of Contemporary Art in Sedalia, Missouri. All the work in the exhibition catalog was the documentation of work that no longer exists. The new work is the collective spirit of the ideas, images and studies that have been the core of Jablonski’s spiritual, intellectual and psychological quests. The exhibition catalog documents the essence of her creative spirit. Clay has its own ideology and its own energy that was transformed and transcended by Jablonski after thoroughly engaging in the ritual process; the quest and rebirth of her art.

About the Author
Kathleen Desmond is an art critic who lives in Kansas City, Missouri. She is professor of art and Byler Distinguished Faculty at Central Missouri State University.