In a reflective moment, Roseline Delisle ponders a photograph of herself posed alongside a cluster of her monolithic ceramic vases, with their demure stripes in black and white and blue. She could be one of them, in her plain white top with black slacks tapering toward the floor. Erect, hands on hips, head tilted at a slight, quizzical angle, she mimics the stance of the six pieces at her side. "I should have placed myself on a pedestal," she remarks wryly.
This is not a casual picture. There is nothing casual about Delisle when it comes to her artwork. True, at first glance the work evokes the impression of highly polished, perfectly decorative industrial ware, and the casual observer's eyes might stop at the precisely chiseled profile, the seemingly measured lines, the flawless seams and surfaces, the appearance of eggshell fragility and strength. But with Delisle's work that first impression is no more than a tease, a trap for the eye so easily seduced by the appeal of beauty for its own sake. Even the fragility, it turns out, is no more than skin deep, since Delisle's complex productions these days are secured by an armature that both reinforces them internally and allows her to bolt them to their base. Let's be clear at the outset that these works have the full gravity and presence of free-standing sculptures.
"I have always wanted to make big work," the artist says. "But it takes a long time to become what you want to become. It's a matter of trusting yourself." As she tells it, January 17, 1993 provided her with the moment of truth she needed to risk trusting herself beyond the relatively small scale works she had until then been able to produce. On that day of the powerful Northridge earthquake in the Los Angeles area, the shelves of Delisle's Santa Monica studio shook disastrously, and much of her delicate porcelain work-in-progress was left in shards. Delisle was devastated. In retrospect, however, she now sees the cataclysm as having provided fertile ground in which her work was freed to take an immense leap forward, toward what she had always wanted it to be.
There are no accidents. As is so often the case, the destruction offered a clean slate, opening the door for her artist's ingenuity to find creative solutions to what had been holding her back-most significantly the limitations of the medium of porcelain itself. Determined to protect herself from such eventualities in the future, she realized first that she had reached the limits of what she could do with the material she had chosen to work with. Already in the previous year, she had attempted a larger scale in nine porcelain pieces; only three of them survived the firing process. "It's closer to glass than clay," she explains. "Porcelain vitrifies in firing, shrinking and distorting as much as16 to 18 percent. Any little torque in the throwing comes back tenfold." Multiply that by the increase in scale and by the number of separate elements that must fit together perfectly to reach her scale requirements, and you have a recipe for frustration.
After the earthquake, then, Delisle turned to earthenware for the first time, finding in this medium the tensile strength that allowed her to create more reliable, larger, and less brittle building elements on the potter's wheel that continues to hold the center of her work. "Work on the wheel is such a traditional idea," she says: "I want to have my feet in there, but my head somewhere else. While I use that traditional element of pottery, my concern has always been for the visual, not the functional." In this tradition, she had already earned an international reputation for her virtuosity in working with the most demanding of materials: "My love for porcelain," she acknowledges in retrospect, "was about its purity. It was almost a sickness on my part, I wanted to eliminate everything that wasn't perfect." Now, she discovered, with the new medium, "the work was no longer about perfection, it could be about a million other things." Suddenly the obsessive skill she had painstakingly developed became no more than "a chip in the brain," and the artist could turn her attention from the breathtaking how of "transforming a ball of very low grade matter into the highest sophistication" to the deeper issues around intention, substance, and integrity.
After the earthquake, too, her new distrust of the earth itself forced Delisle to invent other ways to establish confidence. Supplementing the clay structure with the concept of an inner armature not only provided stability and strength, it also allowed her to conceptualize on a different scale. Working large-up to six feet in height-is only a part of it, for the artist carefully differentiates between scale and size. Human scale, for her, is less about height than about proportionality, the relationship between limbs, head, and torso, and she sees her work these days as primarily anthropomorphic. Even as she continues to insist upon the primacy of the wheel and generates vase-like constructions, she disclaims interest in the kind of ware that the wheel has been used traditionally to create: "I don't really care for my work to be a vessel," she asserts. "I feel that at some point my work will be all sculpture without opening. I don't know when it will happen, but I'm aiming toward that."
For the time being, the "openings" remain hidden. The larger ones are sealed at the seams where the constituent elements meet, as many as eight of them to build a single piece. The stripes that would otherwise mark their presence are lost amongst the tiers of other parallel stripes. Lift the finial "topknot", though, and you will find the only opening-usually quite tiny-that remains as vestigial testimony to the container-vessel from which the work derives. As you do, as though to inscribe the moment indelibly on the mind, a shock of unexpected color often greets your eye, tempting you to speculate further into the unrevealed, unknowable depths below. It is here, more than anywhere, the Delisle's enigmatic objects insist upon their mystery.
The human reference becomes most evident when the works are clustered, taking on a curious identity in relation to each other, a cast of characters that all speak in some way of their creator. See two of them together, for example, and immediately the eye distinguishes male and female, animus and anima, the king and queen of the chess-board. Since it is clearly not a matter of conventional human profile, it remains hard to say what specific elements distinguish the two: the male may appear slightly taller than the female, but the difference otherwise has something to do with the presence, the weight, the horizontal in relation to the vertical, the rhythm of descending or ascending stripes. It is the stripes, too-not a decorative element, to Deslisle's way of thinking, but a form of minimalist painting-that set the figures in motion in the mind's eye, spinning each at its own speed, with its own peculiar energy. The more we watch them the more these static objects begin to dance, whirling dervishes, their fins flung out as balancing arms, taking on the curious, awkward elegance of those geometric Bauhaus dancers that have haunted Delisle's imagination ever since she attended a performance of Oskar Schlemmer's Triadic Ballet-"body forms," she recalls, "transposed into concentric circles, cylinders, and cones."
Much concerned with her artistic heritage, Delisle points not only to Schlemmer but to Russian Constructivists like Malevich and El Lissitsky as the source for the forms and volumes that fascinate her. She is quick to point out, though, that her work is based as much in line as in volume, and looks equally to the extraordinary early figure drawings of Picasso-remarkable, she says, "for the curve, the line, the proportions of the human figure." In the same way, we can readily understand when she describes those beautiful late cut-out figures of Matisse in cobalt blue as being "completely in line with what I do." Amongst the few ceramists she cites as personal inspiration is Lucy Rie, the great British pioneer of twentieth century ceramics, whom she picks out precisely "for the beauty and lightness of her lines." Exacting in her attention to the profile that her works present, Delisle has a mirror installed behind her pottery wheel in order to be able to view the evolving shape in two dimensions only as she works. The long, elegant curves, precise straight lines and surprising, delicately jutting fins are the result of hours of endlessly meticulous shaping and honing, sanding and polishing at the wheel, until the linear profile achieves the perfection she requires.
Recently, the delicate, sharp-edged complexity of Delisle's fins and finials has become the subject of more intense investigation in the works she calls her "water towers." Shorter and more compact than the figures, they retain some of the anthropomorphic reference of their taller cousins even as they become more architectural in execution and appearance. Mindful of her lasting ambition to work in monumental scale-another ceramics mentor: John Mason-she dreams of building a water tower twenty-five feet high, set on the horizon at the top of a hill. And perhaps this opportunity will present itself one day: something similar nearly came her way three years ago, when she was invited to submit a public art proposal for the Jay Pee Hotel and Convention Center in Agra, India. Availing herself of the visualizing power of computer graphics, she projected three "figures," 18 to 25 feet, each to stand in one of the three atria of the building. The first, she wrote, would be "monumental, dignified, and noble," the second "graceful, elegant, and sensuous," and the third, "imaginative, playful, and whimsical." I for one regret that the project was never realized, for it would have engaged every aspect of Delisle's creative sensibility, from her love of what she calls "the tooling and machining" to her passion for the elegance of line, her constructivist fantasy, and her minimalist sense of color.
In the meantime, though smaller in size than these giant projections, her works continue to haunt those corners of our imagination where we long for markers, monoliths, monuments. Strong, silent, mysterious, they offer us endlessly moving reflections on the most basic of our qualities as humans: the upright posture that separates us from all our fellow earthly creatures. Their powerful inherent contradictions-between the vertical and the horizontal, strength and fragility, movement and stasis, stability and instability, imperviousness and vulnerability-mirror the deep paradoxes we experience daily in our physical perception of our selves in relation to the world and other human beings. They speak to us of our irremediable solitude as well as our constant longing to be in touch; and their presence, at once comforting and strangely disturbing, is more analogous to that of a friend than of an inanimate object.
Currently, Delisle dreams of venturing into asymmetry, and of seeking out new colors for "a different spirit, a different resonance." Whatever the direction of her future work, however, we may be sure it will be rooted in the humanity that is her lasting source of inspiration.
