Bonnie Lynch: Vessels

Bonnie Lynch’s vessels have fascinated me for more than ten years. I first saw them in Donald Judd’s house in Marfa, Texas, where he had collected and beautifully installed about half a dozen pieces in a room flooded with light. The austere shapes and stark colors had a compelling beauty—an equilibrium of quiet restfulness and a slightly precarious balance. Their matte and smooth surfaces were white or light brown, usually with an irregular dark grey coloration, as if sooty. Lynch began to work with clay more than 15 years ago, using the ancient method of pit firing, a process that she continues to use today.

She grew up on a ranch east of El Paso, and concedes that the wide-open land of the West Texas landscape was a source of her desire to create forms of great clarity and scale. Lynch affirms that “the forms are references to the landscape—to the surface of the dirt, to the stones and boulders, to the spaciousness and variation in the day and night sky, to the intense silence, and to the temperature variations of icy cold, clear, crisp winter mornings, and hot, hot, dry June days. The vessels also make reference to the meditative state of the desert.”

The vessels that Lynch creates are tactile; their surfaces have a seductive texture. The physical labor required to work with clay and firing kilns helps Lynch generate an intense focus based on the synergy of mind and body. She creates her vessels using hand-formed coils, which she layers and subsequently smoothes and thins with a wooden paddle and anvil. A slow, controlled drying period is followed by two firings, during which organic materials such as manure and straw are built up around the vessel and allowed to burn slowly. Much of the firing process is left to chance and the elements. The firings will take different turns, producing unique marks, so that the smoky finishes of her pieces depend entirely on the interaction of clay and fire and the environmental vagaries of wind, temperature and humidity.