January 11, 2019

A few delicate tendrils tip a porcelain cone askew, creating an underneath place, unreachable and mysterious. Austin-based artist Tammie Rubin's body of intuitively-created sculptures that comprised her recent show at Women and Their Work, Everything You Ever, are filled with these kinds of mysterious negative spaces while tangles of organic shapes come together to create a form, something new. They work much like the ball moss they were built from: a ubiquitous-to-Texas bromeliad that finds its own negative spaces among the branches of tree tops in which to create a home, something new, while it absorbs the carbon dioxide and moisture from the air around it. Breathing in, breathing out.

Rubin's process is clearly iterative and exploratory. It starts with a form, a cone in almost all of the works, and then ball moss and other materials like steel wool, twine, and wire are used to create a shape that appears as alive as her process—I overheard one visitor compare them to corals, a thought that was crossing my mind at almost exactly the moment it was verbalized. Rubin dips into and slathers the forms with a porcelain slip (imagine clay the consistency of a thin pudding). The slip further builds on the underlying forms, which now are a series of layers and disparate pieces that have come together into a whole. When fired, the flammable materials such as the moss and the twine burn away, leaving miniscule tunnels and gaps inside of the clay shell, some of which are exposed in various places. The wire and steel remain, contributing to the jumble of positive and negative spaces, of solidity and emptiness. Glazes are applied for the final firing, and anyone who has worked with ceramics understands that glazes are themselves a balance between control and release. The forms are fragile, beautiful, and mesmerizing.

The energies of our time and place entwine themselves through the work, wrapping around the exteriors, winding through the tunnels, bottlenecking in tight corners, and resting momentarily in crevices as Rubin adds her voice and vision into conversations about race and identity and politics and societal structures, as well as the tensions that underly all of these things. But she doesn't condescend to tell us how to feel. She leaves a blank at the end. Everything You Ever ______________.

Everything you ever believed.

Everything you ever hoped for.

Everything you ever feared.

Everything you ever loved.

Everything you ever lost.

Blank spaces do not remain blank. Entropy ensures that. Something will find its way in to fill the space. Rubin leaves what that something is up to each of us. What will we fill the empty spaces with? The question catapults the work into the realm of universal human experiences, beyond just the here and now, into a place less constrained by time.

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All content is created as an extension of my practice and artistic influences. Opinions are my own.

Rubin's interview on Austin Art Talks was featured in my December 2018 Read, Listen, Look post.

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