Rail: I spent some time recently looking at your earlier work, and one of the things I noticed was the idea of a base or a piece that elevates the top form. The early works had a kind of base that maybe a scholar’s rock has, you know? They had a kind of art historical notation. And now hearing you go through your making, this idea of how the form touches the pedestal or the table changes over the years of your making… I just wanted to touch on that, because I see you returning to this idea of elevating the forms like you were doing in your early pieces.
Butterly: That’s interesting. You’ll see that at the Tang show, for sure, because it covers thirty years of my work. You’ll see some of those early works, and some that were very much inspired by scholar’s rocks, definitely. I went to the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, and I came across their scholar’s rocks. I remember thinking I wanted to elevate the pieces, and I wanted negative space underneath. I wanted some air under them. When I saw the scholar’s rocks, I took off on that. You never know where inspiration is going to come from. It’s a gift. I feel like it comes at the time when you need it.
Rail: Again, listening, listening.
Butterly: With this body of work in particular, I wanted to make things that are beautiful,
but that reflect the state of the world as I see it now, from my point of view. For years, I’ve been saying I want to make beautiful things, but how can I when the world is so complicated and there’s so much suffering and pollution? How do I make something beautiful? Over the last two years, there’s been an evolution. I’ve been collecting ways of finding beauty. I became aware of it more consciously when I was in India. The last time I was in India, I was in Mumbai at a time when it was very hot, very humid, and the weather pressure system had stalled. They were doing a ton of construction, and there was so much pollution in the air because it wasn’t moving, and all the concrete dust from the buildings was going up, and the sunsets were so stunning. They were the most beautiful, ominous, glowy lilac with this burning orange sun. And I was so taken with how incredibly beautiful the sky was, and then realizing it was beautiful because it was reflecting and being filtered by the pollution that was in the air. Then I came back to the US and there was the most recent round of wildfires in California, and friends were posting photographs online of the sky. The sunset was blazing red, and it was so beautiful, yet the conditions for its being were horrific. I think what I’m trying to pull out now is that this is the world we are in now, and I’m finding beauty in destruction. I’m finding beauty in extinction. I’m finding beauty in my garden. I’m allowing myself the time to really look, to really listen and find beauty, but also to acknowledge the reality that we live in. These experiences really helped me understand how I can use color to speak about a complex beauty that I’m seeing in the world right now.
My mind is blown all the time, laying on the grass at night and looking up at the stars, at the Milky Way, seeing satellites dashing around, and the occasional shooting star—I just realize how utterly small I am, and that I’m just a part of this big universe. But the word “beauty” also fails me a lot, because it’s so nailed to things that I don’t appreciate: patriarchy, capitalism, control of women’s bodies. There are all kinds of ways that beauty is used as a kind of cudgel, and lately, I’ve been trying to reframe the idea of beauty as something like the pleasure of looking.
Rail: I wonder if you would tell me more about beauty inside the world of your studio, and about your relationship to pleasure through looking. I’m also thinking about how that might be connected to the way these works demand in-person looking. I’ve heard words like “collapsed” or “deflated” used to describe your work, and I don’t see them that way at all. I don’t see them as collapsed or deflated. I think you’re trying to broadcast your ideas about things that are alive. Things that are alive move, things that have energy move. There’s a subtle way that these pieces breathe, and the color contributes to that sense of motion. What do you think about all of that?
Butterly: This is something I’m very clear about: I talk about perfection a lot. It parallels what you’re saying about beauty: the perfect I’m talking about is not the perfect that the world at large is talking about. My perfect is perfectly awkward, perfectly off-kilter, perfectly sad, or perfectly beautiful. It’s about being human. My idea of perfection is the perfectness of the emotions of being human. I’m not after that ideal, “perfect beauty.” I’m after the ideal of perfect feeling: feeling tired, feeling exuberant, feeling glorious. People do sometimes see these works as “collapsing.” I’m always a little confused about it. Sometimes I can see that, but I make the forms, and I feel like I bring them to life. So I don’t see them as collapsing. I see them as evolving. I see them as breathing.
One reason for not wanting to part with these in my studio was that I would have them on the shelf in my wall, finished, and as I would work on other pieces—particularly High Vibration—I swear it was breathing, while I was working. The color is absorbent; it absorbs light, but it also radiates light at the same time. There’s the strangest push and pull to the colors that I’m working with, and as the light would change in the studio, the shadows and the highlights would shift on the piece, so the pieces were visually moving and breathing. It makes them feel utterly alive to me. That’s something I’m so excited about, with my next body of work. I don’t know where it’s going to go, but I do know that I am pursuing monochromatic works, and the forms are becoming very important. I need to get the forms. I need to keep carving them until they feel alive. When I’m carving them, I’m carving big holes and knocking off sections. They’re so fragile, because they’re raw clay, and I’m carving them with razor blades and tools. I have this love for the works—I’ll take days to repair them as I build. Part of my process is breaking them while I’m working, because I need to carve them so that they speak. Some of them, like Float, for example, you can see through it practically, it’s so thin in areas. It floats. The piece floats. But in terms of colors, the monochromatic colors, I’ve gotten to the point now that I’m combining and making my own colors. I don’t make my glazes anymore. What I do is I manipulate the colors. I’ve been channeling certain colors that I need, like in Thar, I needed to make a turmeric color. I combined a few glazes and did tests and tweaked and figured out what color spoke turmeric to me the most, and then I got it. It’s super interesting to me, because it’s a new challenge, and I’m really into finding the right color for the right form.
Rail: In this particular show, I feel like you’re finding out something about the form first and letting it choose its color instead of trying to use color to delineate particular areas on the form.
Butterly: Color is the form. Color is not always describing the form. The form becomes the color.
When I went to India most recently, I wanted to be as open to flow as possible, and just kind of take it in and have no preconceived ideas about anything. I just decided to let go. I have this mantra, basically, after coming back from India, and it’s called “see me now.” As I’m working and doing multiple firings, I used to have an idea of where I wanted the piece to go, and I’ve kind of stopped doing that. I would put the piece in the kiln thinking I knew what I wanted, and then perhaps it came out the way I wanted it, and perhaps it didn’t. So now I open up the lid of the kiln, and I look in, take the piece out and look at it at point zero again. “See me now.” See me how I am exactly now. Don’t see me how I was. Don’t see me how you think I should be. See me now.
Another thing that is interesting to me with this body of work is that they’re such individual characters. They all come from the same place, and it’s my job to enable them to be what they want to be. In this show, some of them are highly worked on and glazed and sculpted, with beads carved on them, lines built up on them. There’s a lot of visual energy. The labor is very apparent. And then with the monochromatic ones, the labor is different.
Rail: Is that something relatively easy for you to play with while you’re working? If you start something out with a high gloss, can you go back to matte? Can you go forwards and backwards in that decision making?
Butterly: Yes and no. With the monochromatic ones, you really only get one chance to get that perfect color. It’s a lot of build up of the glaze itself. But I think the other thing is, you do not see one brush mark on these. Somebody was asking me if I airbrush them. If you look at Syzygy, you do not see a brush mark on that at all. But that’s hand layered glaze. It’s a very slow, methodical build up of glaze.
Rail: I love this one. I feel like it’s got kind of a Mark Rothko situation on the bottom.
Butterly: It does. That’s another thing. It just went into me. And I can’t say whether I was trying to channel Rothko or not, because the thing is, this is a perfect example of “see me now.” This cube, this base, I intended it for a different piece. I was making it for something else. And this is the underpainting. I was building up these colors, and the next glaze was going to be a bubbly off-white. It would be like a haze. But when I took this out of the kiln and I said, “See me now,” it was like, don’t you dare touch that. It sat there for a while, all lonely on the shelf, and then I made this form, put it on the top, and I kind of gasped. I had this thought: can I do that? It took me a few days. Then I realized, yeah, I can do that. Syzygy is a great example of my thought process. Up in Maine in the fall, I was taking my morning walk, and I noticed above the hill the moon and the sun were in perfect alignment along the horizon. They were both the same equal distance from the earth in a parallel line. And I was looking, thinking, that’s so strange. I thought, there’s got to be a word for that: Syzygy. So that’s how this piece made sense to me.
That’s the other thing: the pieces have to make sense. Like Thar: I made the form, and then I made the turmeric color glaze to go on it, and then I put it on the sage base, and my husband kept saying, “That’s done.” And I was like, “No, I think it needs one more thing.” I sat there for a month not knowing what to do. And then I was looking at it, and I realized it reminded me of the desert, the color and the form. And then I was thinking about Rajasthan, in India, and I was thinking, “Oh, what’s the desert that I’m going to visit in Rajasthan on my next trip?” It’s the Thar desert. I looked up pictures, and I saw these undulating, beautiful, rippling waves of sand that had a very unique color to them—not turmeric, but a beautiful, warm sandstone color. And I came up with the title, Thar, for the piece. And then I didn’t need to add any color, because it was complete. What I was waiting for was the connection to a reality that I understand.
Rail: This should be heard by every young artist, this idea of how things are finished. Sometimes it’s a material move, and sometimes it’s a psychological or conceptual framing.
Butterly: I needed the concept. The piece was done. It looked done, but I didn’t understand it yet. I didn’t make the connection. I needed solidity. Sure, I can make pretty things or nice things, but there has to be a meaning or a reason behind it for me.
Rail: I feel like Dowsing has a lot of humor, which is something I have thought about with your work in the past. Not so much with this show. This show doesn’t feel like it’s so much engaged with humor. I feel like it mirrors the natural world in a way that maybe some of the other work that you’ve made hasn’t. That’s what’s going to be so great about the Tang show—you’re going to be able to see these decisions come forward, go into the background, assert themselves again. And I think you’ll get so many ideas from seeing all of your work in one place.
Butterly: It’s going to be interesting to see these pieces again, because I haven’t seen many of these in twenty-something years. To have them together as a unified family is going to be a very loud conversation. This summer we had, you know, hundreds of Xeroxes on the floor of the pieces, and they were in a spiral around my studio. And when it was laid out like that, I realized, “Oh my god, this is my life before my eyes.” But also I saw distinct groups of work. So even though I’ve been working with the idea of the vessel form for so long, I saw these distinct moments of focus.
There was the focus on my body early on, and pregnancy—all the energy was in the belly area. And then after 9/11, I started making what I call “Heavy Heads,” because the pieces were these heads that couldn’t hold themselves up. Then I kind of moved on to forms that were equally interesting on the inside and the out, exposing that I can breathe now, I’m not that fearful anymore. There was this evolution, and there’s always been humor in the work, firstly because I think that’s my personality: very serious, but also funny. But I also think that historically, artists like Philip Guston or Peter Saul use humor to talk about these very serious issues. I think that is a way of coping or dealing with things.
Rail: I feel like I’m always talking about sound when I’m with you. Did you know that one of the desired qualities of some scholar’s rocks is that you strike them and they sound like bells? This vessel shape is like a mouth or a broadcasting instrument. When I look at them, I can’t help but think about the kind of sound they might make. Now I know that they say “see me now.” Do they ever talk to you after they’re done? Do you think that these ones that you’re going to see at the Tang that you haven’t encountered for a long time are going to say new things to you?
Butterly: Oh, for sure. This is a weird analogy, but growing up, my grandmother lived in Florida, and we would go visit her each year, and each year we would go to Disney World. So I would see it with a kid’s eye. And then as I got older and I had kids, I would take them, and I started looking at it differently. I was thinking about the mechanics of how Disney World works. How do they get all these people in here? How do they do things? So now I’ll be seeing my work from a different vantage point of age and experience. I do know what I was thinking about. I can look at a piece, and with certain pieces I’ll know what I was listening to on the radio when I made it. Another thing about sound, which is interesting, is when I’m adding the glaze, especially the monochromatic forms, I know that I’ve added the right amount of glaze when I can hear it. For me to figure out if the glaze is enough, I take a pin and I tap it. I just take a pin, and I tap around the piece, and I can hear the thickness of the glaze, so I know if it’s even or not. We use all our senses as artists, right?
Rail: Have you always had this sense to check your glaze like that? Or is that a master’s game?
Butterly: Maybe it’s a master’s game. I don’t know. This is a new thing for me.
Rail: I feel like we’ve talked about you understanding and knowing the work when it shows up. I feel like you’ve always had a very singular vision that has not really been interrupted by the eyes or the expectations of the world. I’m thinking about all of these different ways that you’re using intuitive tools, along with your biggest tool, which is an almost yogic ability to concentrate and focus, to meditate on something until it starts talking to you. I think that is really one of the reasons why I’ve always loved your project so much, is because it’s so yours.
Butterly: That means a lot. Thank you. I think I try not to have a filter. I think I’ve always been this way in my life, not just in art. I make what I make, and I don’t worry about what the world thinks, because if I’m honest with my work and pull out what I’m feeling from it and what it needs, I feel like other people can read that and respond to that feeling. Like what I was saying about something being perfectly awkward. We’re all perfectly awkward. And maybe that’s not something we discuss, but I think that’s something we all feel and can connect with. I don’t filter out the awkwardness, I don’t filter out the ugliness. I don’t worry about how it’s received. I don’t worry where I fit in. I don’t think I’ve ever fit in. And that’s actually a pretty free place to be. I just do my own thing. As artists, aren’t we supposed to do our own thing? Aren’t we supposed to not think about the outside world and what they think?
Rail: I think we are.
Butterly: All of my work is also really small scale, right? I’m really clear that this is my scale. I can speak most strongly at this scale, because I think this scale is really particular to my work. It’s small, but it can hold a large space and your attention and can pull you in and keep you there for a long time. In this world of excess and taking up huge amounts of space to say something, I think I can say something more powerfully in a small space. I’ve always preferred a whisper to a shout.