Emma Crowley has made a lot of mugs.
That sounds like a small thing to lead with, but it explains everything else. Emma teaches ceramics, and has for years. Teaching a material means demonstrating it over and over, and a person who has thrown the same form several thousand times develops a kind of certainty in the hands that you cannot fake and cannot rush. You see it in the walls of her vessels, which are even where they should be even. You see it in her glazes, which do exactly what she intended.
What is interesting is what she does with all that control.
Precision, and then something else
A lot of technically excellent pottery is boring. The maker gets so good at the form that the form is all there is, and you end up with a shelf of competent, forgettable objects.
Emma goes the other way. The craft is meticulous and the results are not tidy. Her forms lean. Her color decisions are louder than they need to be. A handle will do something a handle has no business doing. The precision is real, and it is in service of something considerably less well-behaved. Fashionable and chaotic, held in balance.
That is a hard thing to pull off, and it is the reason her work reads as contemporary rather than traditional. These are not heritage pots. They are objects made by somebody who knows the rules thoroughly enough to be interesting about breaking them.
From the Bay Area to the School of the Art Institute
Emma is originally from the Bay Area and trained at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where our own Lily Formato first met her. She works across ceramics, sculpture, and painting, and that range shows up in the pottery. There is a painter's instinct in how she handles surface, and a sculptor's instinct in how she handles volume.
She still teaches, which is worth saying plainly. A working ceramics instructor is somebody who has to be able to explain, out loud, why a thing works. That habit of articulation tends to show up in the work itself.
Made to be used
Emma's ceramics are functional. Mugs, bowls, plates, vessels for the things that accumulate on a countertop.
They are meant for hands, for dishwashers, for Tuesday mornings.
This is not a small claim about accessibility.
It is a claim about where art belongs. A painting asks you to stop and look. A mug asks nothing, and then you use it twice a day for six years and it becomes part of how you remember that stretch of your life.
If you have been meaning to own a piece of original art and have not known where to start, functional ceramics are an honest place to begin. You will use it immediately. You will not wonder whether you were supposed to like it.
See the work
Emma's ceramics are on the shelves now at Formato Fine Arts. Come pick one up, which is the only way to actually judge a pot. Weight and balance do not photograph.
Follow her at @emmacrow.art to see what comes out of the kiln next.
Visit us
Formato Fine Arts, 100 W Main Street, Wytheville, Virginia.
Thursday through Saturday, 11 to 3.
Sunday through Wednesday by appointment.
Someone is usually here beyond posted hours, so it is always worth trying the door.
