Amelia Lockwood: Eighth Lane

Amelia Lockwood, lover labra (detail), 2022, Stoneware and glaze

Amelia Lockwood, Eighth Lane at Various Small Fires, Los Angeles

By D.K. Sole

Eighth Lane is a collection of large ceramics standing on the raked grey gravel outside the glass doors of Various Small Fires. They suggest altars, non-denomenational worshipping sites where rows of flames have been lit. “Candelabras,” says the press release. “Gothic.” The artist calls them “labras.” The flames are made of clay, peaked blobbies colored orange or red. Pairs of them stick up from the dinky shelves on the sides of “shade soil” like tangerine fangs. The fires have the same hardness as the ziggurat legs and ribbed fans that support them. Materially they all belong to the same world, one that the viewer doesn’t fully occupy, a world where even the most ephemeral thing is made of earth. The colors shift from reds and blacks to wedding cake prettiness; in their world everything is either sinister or supernaturally innocent. There are changes of scale that create moments of delicacy against the stoic chunk of the clay. The sides of “shade soil” next to the flame-fangs are huge and smooth and the shelves stick out there like climbers on the flanks of mountains.  

The direction of this fire-worship is internal to the creator. The ritual is the experience of being there on this deliberate gravel, the walls standing around me, the privacy of the courtyard; the blue sky. The scale of the forms suggests that if worship is occurring then it is personal. The labras are not big enough to serve a crowd.  

The solid forms are full of lines and patterns, sometimes hand-drawn, sometimes three-dimensional. On pieces like “double beacon” and “interia dial” they’re decorative, existing to intensify the mood of obsessive reverence. In other places they’re necessary to the form, specifically in “steady state” and “smoke ring” where netted globes have been suspended on clay rods around a central sphere. As I stand there I think about the creator who came up with this impossible idea of flying rings and then had to make it happen with the stuff she had given herself. The fact that she’s chosen to use clay means the supports can’t get too thin, of course, and I am aware that the pieces can’t reach the mysterious otherworld she has made them long for, the land of spiritual evanescence and operatic morals. The fires are not even dangerous, no one needs to tend them; they will cosplay their litness forever, or however long it takes the clay to fall apart. No, the fire is in danger from me. I could break it.

That tension gives the work an impact that goes deeper than simple effectiveness. (If she’d wanted effectiveness then she could have used metal to create thinner supports. She could have made the globes hover digitally, on video.) The pieces stand in for a series of unattainable states. Am I going too far if I conflate these headstone-like proportions with actual headstones and think of them as death? The dead person is somehow present but unattainable? Or if I borrow the word “Gothic” and think of Gothic cathedrals, technically-complicated masses that dream of a being who is neither material nor technical? The effort to make imagination real creates a third state of its own, and the artist appears to be aware of it, and wishes we would see it.

Amelia Lockwood, Eighth Lane
Various Small Fires, 812 North Highland Avenue, Los Angeles, California 90038
May 14 – August 27, 2022

Published by Wendy Kveck on August 25, 2022