Presented by Equity Bank
Born and raised in North Carolina, ceramic artist Cary Esser earned a BFA at the Kansas City Art Institute in 1978. “As a student,” recalls Esser, “riding my bike through urban neighborhoods was a fantastic introduction to the use of ceramics as architectural ornament. There are excellent examples all over—my favorites include the Mexican Talavera Uriarte tiles in the Plaza and the colorful embellishments at Main Street between 39th and 40th.”
In 1996, Esser returned to KCAI as the ceramics chair. She received the KCAI Distinguished Achievement Award in 2013. Esser, along with her students and colleagues, was featured in Season Two of the PBS Craft In America television series. A resident artist at Belger Crane Yard Studios, Esser has also participated in residencies at the Archie Bray Foundation, the Northern Clay Center, and the International Ceramics Studio in Hungary. She has received grants from the Lighton International Artists Residency Program and the McKnight Foundation. Her work is shown nationally and has been represented by Sherry Leedy Contemporary Art of Kansas City for 20 years.
The many possibilities inherent in clay shaped by the human hand continue to inspire Esser. “The four applications of ceramics through most of history are architecture, figures, utilitarian and ritual objects, and sanitary ware,” she says. “Buildings, dishes, human and animal forms, sinks and toilets—they’re all related, all vessels, all bodies. This is endlessly fascinating and compelling to me.”
What is it about the medium of clay that intrigues you?
My passion for clay includes glaze, which when fired together with clay forms the material known as ceramics. In the studio, I love its mutability and tactility, its history, its relationship to architecture and the earth, and its ability to transform. Ceramics, in all its processes of becoming, is not one material but many. At various times it is wet, dry, soft, hard—it is at once a medium for dimensional form and a canvas and substance for color, texture, image, narrative. I am intrigued by the way ceramics can be both sculptural and painterly, 2D and 3D, while a carrier of content.
I spend a lot of time in the glaze lab, testing and developing glaze surfaces of interest to me. I’m especially captivated by metallics and textures that reflect different kinds of substances: oil, metal, salt, snow, crystal, and stone.
How does teaching complement your individual studio work?
My teaching and art making are inextricably linked. There’s this perpetual astonishment of what can emerge in a creative environment, with an individual person or a cohort of students. And because KCAI has a curriculum in which students choose a major and take in-depth courses for three years, I see them grow and change. I feel tremendous gratitude for my connections with students and colleagues at KCAI.
What is your process? Do you sketch first? Start working with clay and let an idea come to you?
Sketching is a tool for furthering an idea once I have initiated it in clay. I work in sequence, in iterations of similar forms. I enjoy the changes from one piece to the next, and I intentionally set up opportunities for variations in effects that are out of my control. Yet, once I learn to control an effect, I tend to lose interest, and look to interject another variable that’s once again out of my control.
Moving my body—working—helps to provoke ideas. There’s also an important time in the studio for sitting still, observing what has been made, thinking, and reflecting.
I’m constantly sourcing inspiration outside the studio, though when I make, it’s about how my actions will build into something new and unexpected.
How has Kansas City nurtured your arts career?
When I returned to Kansas City in 1996, I found a city that had fully embraced the arts.
As for my personal art practice, I have greatly benefited by knowing the collective of artists at the Belger Crane Yard Studios. I have enjoyed a two-decade relationship with Sherry Leedy Contemporary Art. Many of us grew up in places where there were few facilities for the arts. In KC there are numerous opportunities for students and artists to create and share artworks, and hundreds of jobs in our galleries, museums, arts centers, schools, and performing venues. The Kansas City community benefits from that.