Works by Walter Dexter at the exhibition "Tribute,"
at the Jonathon Bancroft-Snell Gallery in London, Ontario, Canada, November 2007. Photo: Courtesy Bancroft-Snell
| | Raku October 1st 1992, 14 in. (36 cm) in height. | Receding Man with Cross, 23 in. (58 cm) in height, 2007.
| | Untitled, 22 (56 cm) in height, 2004. | | Nightscape, 24 in. (61 cm) in
height, 2006. |
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Walter Dexter
by Brian Grison
Walter Dexter's November 2007 retrospective exhibition, "Tribute," at the Jonathon Bancroft-Snell Gallery in London, Ontario, Canada, which sold out during the opening ceremonies, consisted of two components. The first and most significant was a display of about twenty of Dexter's bottles, all produced during the previous year. The other section was a retrospective of about eighty pieces borrowed from collectors in southwest Ontario who had purchased the works from his gallery since 2001. Dexter's exhibition was complimented by a display of ceramic works by about twenty-four Canadian potters who, like Dexter, have been recipients of Canada's most prestigious prize for craft, the $25,000 Bronfman Award.
The relationship between high-art craft and high-art aesthetics in Dexter's current practice is evidence that he is more artist than craftsperson. This thesis encourages a broader discussion of process and aesthetics rather than the more technical discussion that usually plagues the crafts.
Dexter's bottle forms range in height from about eighteen inches to over two feet, and are generally about four inches deep. They are rough, coil-built, rectangular forms from which necks of various lengths and thicknesses rise. Dexter constructs these bottles as wide and high as possible for the size of his kiln. The "torsos" of the bottles are most often flat surfaces that are perpendicular to the table, though often they also taper slightly upward toward the shoulders. Occasionally, they are convex or rounded along the edges. Sometimes, the neck form is extended downward across the body of the bottle as a groove or ridge, suggesting a spine-like structure. The bottle forms refer to the human figure in art in two ways. One is a modernist, idealized and heroic conception of human-ness (in both the physical and metaphysical sense), and the other reminds us of those many so-called primitive figure carvings produced on the cusp between prehistoric and early Mediterranean civilizations.
There are a number of reasons for my claim that Dexter is more an artist than a craftsperson. The most obvious one to me is his apparently cavalier attitude toward craft technology and methods. Artists working with paint and canvas can ignore craft more readily than a potter. Artists often turn mistakes or other natural disasters in their art to their advantage, but a potter is traditionally supposed to discard bowls that slump or crack, or glazes that shatter or stick to the floor of kilns.
Not so with Dexter. When one of his sculptural works has structural or aesthetic problems, he will fix it with the kind of ad hoc inventions that artists commonly employ. For example, perhaps because he discovered that he had run out of the appropriate white glaze, or perhaps as an early example of his non-traditional thinking, he used white latex paint to silhouette a figure on a pot. I laughed when Dexter told me this; artists use latex paint all the time. Though much of the white burned off when he fired the pot, there is enough left to carry the image, much like a gestural figure painting by Dubuffet.
Because it had been fired about seven times, segments of the glaze on Nightscape were breaking away, and Dexter had to use white glue to keep it intact. Potters compulsively fixated on craft correctness would never risk some of the techniques and solutions that Dexter pushes to extremes in his current work. Most potters would roll their eyes at his "cheating" with glue. However, in the art world, where ideation is more important than craft tradition, or perhaps just less tied to craft conventions, such behavior is common.
Dexter willingly risks the structural viability of his pots in order to arrive at the desired aesthetic quality. Like a painter who would paint a sky red when he ran out of blue, when Dexter runs out of a certain color he will use a similar one with only passing attention to the chemistry, and then when it doesn't work, he will reglaze and refire the pot again-and maybe again and again-until he arrives at the color he wants, or something equally interesting.
Because Dexter's bottles are built up from a slab base, these sometimes separate in the numerous firings they often go through. His solution has been to put the bottle on a new base, using glaze as a glue. However, he recently showed me a different solution. When another work required a new base, he constructed a flat-bottomed boat form as a base for the pot. The effect was fascinating. I was reminded that Brancusi's solution for the obtrusive plinth beneath his sculpture was to design and sculpt bases that were unique to each sculpture. With similar unconventional visual thinking, Dexter has added a form that functions as a base as well as plinth while having the poetic magic of an archetypal "female" boat form to carry the "male" pot. Or perhaps it's a male boat supporting the female pot, or an even more contemporary gender-bending myth creation.
The surfaces of Dexter's bottles are generally rather crude. Using his hands, fingers and tools, he works the clay surface with rough, seemingly unconscious, strokes. Sometimes he wraps the form or "collages" layers of clay-saturated burlap onto the sculpted surface. This visceral expressionism is reminiscent of Alberto Giocometti's "attack" on the wet clay of his sculptures in search of the hidden human form. The final bisque-fired, hypersensitive surface that Dexter achieves could be a subtle balance of rough plaster, thick skin or expressionist impasto color. Dexter works the clay surface as if it was impasto paint in the way that abstract expressionist painting can be thought of as a record of the primitive or transcendental act of applying color to canvas. And the final result of this stage of Dexter's production is, in fact, only the bisque-fired substrate for his larger intention, to act out the drama of applying color-as slip or glaze-to these primal surfaces.
For years, Dexter needed to balance his sculpting and painting interests with the production of functional objects-production pots, as it were-because of economic concerns. Since receiving the Bronfman Award, there have been three developments in his practice. The first is that in response to personal difficulties, including the death of his wife and regaining his strength following a stroke, which caused him the loss of his left arm for several months, and with the greater economic security brought by the enthusiastic support of Jonathon Bancroft-Snell (his bottles have tripled in price since 2001), Dexter has decided that he "might as well do what [he] wants." The second development is that he is slowly abandoning "ordinary" wheel-thrown production pottery, though, as he explained to me, he occasionally needs to return to working on the wheel to reconnect with his roots. The third development has been that his long interest in ceramic sculpture as a surface for glaze as color, which began with his breakthrough experiments with raku, has evolved into a full-time engagement with the aesthetic problems that his bottles challenge him with everyday. Subsequently, while he is well known for his beautiful copper-red bowls, drawn and painted portrait and figure plates and his exquisite calligraphic touch on elegant raku, it is with his more recent sculpted and painted bottles that Dexter is making his most important contribution to Canadian art.
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