R E / M E M B E R I N G : Ceramic Sculptures by Lindsay Iliff
There are forms that seem less made than found-drawn up from the deep store of memory where earth, body, and spirit still speak the same language. In "Re/membering," Lindsay Iliff gathers fragments of that older conversation and returns them to us as ceramic sculpture: strange, tender presences that feel at once ancient and newly arrived.
Working with clay, Iliff fashions beings that hover between vessel, figure, seed, creature, and landscape.
Horns branch like desert shrubs. Limbs bend into arcs that suggest embrace, protection, or ceremony. Surfaces carry marks of touch and firing, holding the record of their making as soil holds the memory of rain. These works do not illustrate stories so much as awaken them.
The title, "Re/membering," points toward a mending as much as a remembering-a reassembly of what has been separated. In a culture increasingly estranged from the living world, Iliff's sculptures offer a quiet act of restoration. They call attention to the kinship that persists beneath modern habits of division: the shared substance of body and earth, human and animal, self and landscape.
Rooted in geology and expansive horizons, the sculptures seem to emerge from the ground, itself. Their forms evoke weathered stones, ancestral effigies, seed pods, antlers, and unseen desert life. Yet they resist fixed interpretation. Instead, they inhabit a fertile threshold where imagination and memory meet, where the viewer is invited to recognize something long familiar but difficult to name.
At the heart of Iliff's practice is an attentiveness to connection. Clay-earth rendered pliant by water and transformed by fire-becomes a fitting medium for this inquiry. Through it, she creates objects that feel both ceremonial and intimate, carrying a sense of endurance while remaining open to mystery.
"Re/membering" is an invitation to recover what has not been lost so much as forgotten: our belonging within the larger field of life. In the presence of these sculptures, one senses not nostalgia for a vanished past, but the possibility of renewal-a gathering together of scattered pieces into a more complete whole.
In Iliff's hands, clay becomes a means of listening. What we hear is the old music of connection, sounding again through earth, form, and touch.
Stephen Parise, Director
Big Happy