Sterling Ruby
in Contre-Nature

Contre-Nature (Against Nature) is an exhibition inhabited by insolent, hybrid shapes made of clay and enamel, such grotesque creatures compose a luxuriant, original, mysterious, troubling, or even hallucinatory world.

Nature is artifice, and artifice becomes nature in order to decategorize scales and values, as well as to reverse commonplaces regarding sculpture and the ceramic tradition. The works gathered concern ceramics less as folklore than as modeling and alchemy, technique, and magic. Water, earth, and fire are the essential, unrivalled components of these new worlds: What we call against nature is in fact against custom.