Guild Gallery is pleased to present the gallery’s second solo exhibition by Missoula, Montana-based artist Casey Zablocki, known for his large-scale, wood-fired ceramic work. The artist’s first collection of ceramic furniture and functional objects of this scale features more than 20 monumental brutalist stoneware sculptures that take the shape of coffee tables, side tables, chairs, and thrones. Developed over two years of deep experimentation and research, the massively-scaled body of work pushes the boundaries of Zablocki’s practice to forge new forms, palettes, and materials, and introduces porcelain, sourced locally, into his pieces for the first time ever.

“Whereas Modern Relics, Casey’s first exhibition at the gallery, was about process, and showing how he worked with the kiln, and the powerful intensity of the kiln–Ceramic Furniture is about pushing the medium to its largest scale. Through tremendous determination, experimentation, and material innovation, Casey alchemizes art and science to create works that are wholly unique within the ceramic furniture movement,” said Robin Standefer, Guild Gallery founder and curator.

In order to develop ceramic furniture at such a large scale–capable of meeting its functional needs, and able to withstand the harsh fabrication context of a wood-fire kiln–Zablocki had to create his own special clay: a clay with minimal shrinkage at firing, with strength enough for the fragile wet forms to be hauled up a mountainside to the kiln, and able to work with the extreme temperatures of an anagama kiln. Through stringent tests of trial and error, he arrived at a unique recipe of domestic clays–fireclay, kaolin, and ball clay among them–bound together with fibrous glass feldspars (glass agents that act as a binder to help the clays meld together).

In Zablocki’s work, one sees the inherent brutality of ceramic furniture. There is a rawness, a brokenness, to the pieces, as if they are found objects: many of the works feel like architectural remnants, ancient rock formations cleaved from the side of a mountain, or mined from a mountain quarry. In this, one sees a dialogue between the organic elements Zablocki encounters on frequent, strenuous backcountry excursions and the primordial materiality of clay. There is also the sheer physicality their making requires of him. Pieces of this ambitious scale are only made possible by the massive anagama wood-burning kiln Zablocki uses, one of the largest in America. Over the course of three firings, each one ten continuous days and nights, he and a team of assistants tend the roaring flames, keeping them alive with more than 11 cords of locally sourced wood, and listening for distinct sonic cues that indicate when more fire or air is needed. The work is as much an homage to earth’s rhythms as it is a product of them.

Transcending artistic trends, Zablocki’s ceramics are born directly from the eternal wilderness which is his backyard—a lasting creative exchange between human and nature. As the artist himself states: “All of those tensions between rough and soft, weight and weightlessness, refined and unrefined–hopefully they can be as timeless as the landscape. As vast as the landscape.”