Object Lesson #30

Cate Bourke, I Shall Never Tire of Representing Her, porcelain

Cate Bourke, Covenant
(1) Name of the Father, porcelain beads, celadon glaze, unglazed separator disks, grosgrain ribbon, Luisa Igloria’s ​“The Gift” (poem) printed on cotton.
(2) Harvest, porcelain rice grains and bowls, unglazed.
(3) Vessels. Stoneware, acrylic paint, latex paint, text.

In the exhibition Cultural Passages: What’s Art Got to Do with It until October 9

Creative Arts Workshop, 80 Audubon Street 

It is not an easy thing to depict both outrage and hope in the same gesture. When it does happen, the result deserves attention. So, consider this ensemble of illusory order. Here are measured, as in an abandoned town square, the dimensions of loss. There are words attached, and the agonized history of Burma, but it is in the pure shapes that we find what pains us in the world. The artist, Cate Bourke, knows the weight of prayer. In another piece, upstairs in the same gallery, her mother’s rosary is fashioned into upright petitions, rocketing to heaven. It recalled to me one of those rare flashes of grace in Cormac McCarthy’s novel, The Crossing, where the wandering central character finds a woman praying, and wonders

“…who could say what worse wastes of war and torment and despair the old woman’s constancy might not have stayed, what direr histories yet against which could be counted at last nothing more than her small figure bent and mumbling, her crone’s hands clutching her beads of fruitseed.”

And then there are these defiant bowls in a protest that is emptiness, but not empty.

Object Lesson #29
Object Lesson #28
Object Lessons #26 & #27
Object Lesson #25
Object Lessons #23 & #24
Object Lesson #22
Object Lesson #21
Object Lesson #20
Object Lesson #19
Object Lesson #18
Object Lesson #17
Object Lesson #16
Object Lesson #15
Object Lesson #14