Excerpt from Deep Cut
By Glenn Adamson
Silberberg already had extensive experience with porcelain, having used it for her functional pottery, and it was porcelain – “an elegant material, hovering between rough clay and glass,” as she puts it – that now absorbed her full attention. Rather than throwing on the wheel, she began to build forms by hand. She first formed the recalcitrant clay into blocks, then sliced these into thinner sheets, layering them with veins of tinted oxide and restacking them. Finally, she carved the composite mass in an intuitive but exacting manner. The initial results were promising: small works, roughly triangular in section and tilting upward from the base, as if extruded by some invisible force. Working at the wheel, she trimmed out a central cylinder from each of these pieces, opening the possibility of using them as containers, while also giving the impression that they had been drilled out or core-sampled.
From there it was a matter of scaling up and developing the language, which Silberberg did with extraordinary boldness. After letting the clay dry to leather-hard stage, she carved into it using a plaster spatula and rubber mallet. Here and there she would tear out a section, leaving behind a rough, self-generated texture; flat planes were sanded perfectly smooth once the clay was bone dry. The challenge was to prevent the works from cracking or even exploding in the kiln. Even a small air pocket, if trapped within the clay, will expand as it heats and send fissures radiating outward. Through trial and error, Silberberg realized that the internal seams of her sculptures allowed small amounts of air to escape; the porcelain fused back together at higher temperatures, restoring the work to solidity. Each piece was a risk (and not all of them did survive firing), but by exploiting this technical effect she was able to construct larger and larger pieces, eventually doing away with the cylindrical voids in their core, and thus any lingering reference to the vessel. At the same time she was broadening her palette, adding colorants into the porcelain to produce grays, blues, browns, and a striking chrome green. The technique is comparable to historic British agate ware, though she says she was more inspired by the use of pigmented clay in modern Japanese ceramics.
