Richard Munster
by Jenn Allen
Richard Munster’s ceramic sculptures
walk the line between man-made and
natural rock formations. His work
contains natural minerals and utilitarian objects fused together. With a
background in functional pottery, he
creates fine art works using his technical understanding of clay. These
sculptures combine the natural, soft
look of the clay with sharp, deliberate cuts. Blurring the line between
ancient and contemporary, Munster
plays on the tradition of ceramics and
discovery.
Jenn Allen: What I really like about
your work is that it’s not time specific. The way I look at your sculptures is that they feel like these artifacts that in 500 years in the future,
if somebody came upon them, they
wouldn’t know where they’re from
and there would be this questioning.
Do you think about that, especially
since with ceramics there is a lot of
archaeology and discovery involved?
Richard Munster: Yeah, I do. I think
that anybody who is interested in the
work that I’m making or is working in
that vein laughs about confusing archeologists. Even to this day, I’ve had
a number of people who respond to
the work saying ‘Oh my gosh, it looks
like it should be in a natural history museum, but…’ and the sentence
kind of ends there. I make works
that look like it should be something
that came out of the ground but obviously isn’t. It is a really delicate balance, but it’s interesting to me.
How do you decide what clay bodies
you use?
Over the last couple of years I’ve
learned a lot more about the specific
materials I’m using. So many of the
materials that we use in the ceramic
tradition or in the ceramic spectrum,
whatever you want to call it, are regular, everyday, materials that exist
around us that are common in industry, whether that’s toothpaste, or sandbags for levees, or paper, or whatever
it may be, they’re all mineral based
products. To be able to incorporate
those into the work that I’m making
is both technically interesting to me,
but also lends to the vocabulary of the
material itself. Whether it’s auto glass,
whether it’s beach sand, beach shells,
or any number of other materials that
I may find along the way, I use those
right: Ossuary, ceramic
below: Pluribus Unum, bentonite clay, charcoal, paint, dirt, & sand
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