Interview with artist Barbara Satterfield
Barbara Satterfield is fascinated by the forms found in nature. Her ceramics accentuate these forms through her artistic interpretation and use of literal shapes. Her works are part of many private and public collections and are exhibited widely including at the Arkansas Governor’s Mansion in 2019. As a curator, teacher, writer and artist, Barbara has a unique appreciation for the arts community in Arkansas and is committed to promoting art and culture around the state. Barbara’s works can be found at her website barbarasatterfield.com.
AAS: Barbara, you have a somewhat unique educational background. It began at Hendrix College with a BA in Theater Arts, then, many years later, an MFA in Studio Ceramics from The George Washington University followed by an MA in Museum Studies from George Washington. Please talk about that journey and what brought you back to Conway.
“I’m incredibly fortunate that my interests have coalesced into wonderful experiences that continue to inform and amaze me.”
BS: A love of learning and a compulsion to make things are the common threads that run through my pursuit of degrees in theatre, art, and museums. I’m incredibly fortunate that my interests have coalesced into wonderful experiences that continue to inform and amaze me.
In retrospect, I can see how my professional goals were foreshadowed by my Hendrix major. Theater is a collaborative art and my involvement in technical aspects introduced me to the process of creating a visual experience for a viewer. I designed and made costumes, discovered the miracles of good lighting, and built sets--getting to see my design for Moliere’s School for Wives come to fruition. Theater Arts made me aware of the impact of visual context.
While raising children, I learned how to network to promote the arts. I served on the Conway Community Arts Association board and was an Artist-in-Education (AIE) with the Arkansas Arts Council. Because art teachers weren’t funded at the time, I began a nonprofit organization to provide arts programs in Conway: Shoestring Productions. We repurposed a 1930’s gas station, the Arts Station, building a stage over the oil pit and mounting a lighting system on the tire rack. We presented children’s plays and exhibits, provided story hours, and sponsored visiting artists for local schools and after-school studio classes. With children in high school, and a divorce pending, I returned to school to retrain for the job market at the University of Central Arkansas. Under the tutelage of UCA’s Ceramic Professor Helen Phillips and informed by the Department of Art’s professional development courses, I pointed myself toward work that would allow me to make, handle, and exhibit art.
My graduate work prepared me to accept the position of Director of the Baum Gallery of Fine Art at the University of Central Arkansas in 2001. My four years in DC broadened my aesthetic sensibilities and enriched my personal life. My MFA program included visiting artists and numerous openings and museum exhibits. My Museum Studies emphasis, Exhibition Development and Design, included technical seminars, back-of-house field trips, and internships with Smithsonian Institutional museums before working part time in the Office of Exhibitions of the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery. I met my husband Jim Volkert through the Museum Studies program: he was Assistant Director of Exhibitions at the Smithsonian Museum of the American Indian at the time and taught the George Washington University exhibit design seminars. However, a confluence of family circumstances led me back to Conway. Jim and I dated long-distance for 2 years before marrying.
AAS: You and James have been very involved in museums, James at the Smithsonian and you were director of the Baum Gallery of Fine Art at UCA for 10 years. Would you talk about the somewhat mysterious (at least to me) work of an art curator?
BS: Curation is a popular term these days. Fashion, décor, even wine is curated for discriminating clients. The implication is that, if we create a group of objects carefully, we are curating (deciding with purpose). In the museum world, art historians rightly claim official curatorial territory. Alfred Barr, art historian and first director of the Museum of Modern Art, cryptically opined that curation is simply grounded in “…a lifetime of informed looking.” His comment understates the breadth of scholarly preparation necessary to bring gravitas to the curatorial process. Professional curatorial decisions are substantiated by a depth of awareness.
However, curation is relative, ongoing, and not limited to museum-affiliated curators. Artists spend their lives looking. They select from their body of work every time they enter a competition or organize an exhibit. Artists who are aware of the history of their medium, the masters and trailblazers, and colleagues working in similar themes or interests are curatorial material. Their lifetime of intentional and informed looking, positions them--by practice and intuition—to be curators who are often asked to juror exhibit competitions.
As a practice, curation is a series of selections, made for a moment in time relative to a theme or underlying brand of an institution, and made based on the curator’s awareness of former and current general trends—with underlying knowledge about art mediums. As an intuitive process, curation is a search for apt visual expressions of a moment in time and work that redefines past trends, perfects current trends, or introduces new content or ways of working. Curators recognize distinctive work that compels them to pause, shuffle through memories of visual and intellectual touchstones, and make a personal decision to affirm its value.
Keep in mind that curation is only one component in the art of exhibit development, a collaborative discipline like theater arts. Jim and I enjoy the composite: the organizing principle of an exhibit, how art work and objects are displayed and encountered, the visitor experience, what onsite and online resources are available to connect the work with a broad demographic.
“Just as some people look to the stars, I tend to look around: I love earth, what grows from it, burrows into it, travels across it and flies over it.”
AAS: Growing up in such an artist household, have any of your children pursued art?
BS: I grew up in a household of life-long learners, as did my children: lots of books, art supplies, and frequent trips to movies and cultural events. Through the Arts Station, we all were introduced to an expansive view of the arts. While they are both incredibly practical and successful having not pursued art as a career, I value their artist hearts. The grandsons, however, are artists in the making: paint, clay, leather, wood turning, welding …
AAS: Clay is such a tactile medium. Does the ‘feel’ of the process help make the connection your pieces have with nature?
BS: Just as some people look to the stars, I tend to look around: I love earth, what grows from it, burrows into it, travels across it and flies over it. I identify with the opposites I observe on a walkabout: a vine’s fragile tendril compared to its mature mass that can strangle a small tree, a shed skin’s ephemeral crinkle compared to the regal ascension of a black rat snake to a low-hanging branch, a dragonfly’s weightless wings compared to their independent maneuverability mid-flight, a tiny tree frog’s tender belly to its courageous call in the evening. When I have felt fragile or unmoored, or defensive, I call on my opposite to balance the load and trust that I can find the tenacity to simply persist with purpose as do dirt daubers, wildflowers, tides, and trees that choir in the wind and share nutrients through root systems. I integrate what inspires and fascinates me. My work is a life-long gleaner’s grateful homage to nature’s amazing capacity to adapt and survive.
AAS: Barbara, please talk about your technique. I know you like to keep the handmade quality in your pieces.
“I feel connected to the history of hand-built ceramics and embrace the organic physicality of the process even though my interpretation of the medium is contemporary.”
BS: I love to roll coils. I feel connected to the history of hand-built ceramics and embrace the organic physicality of the process even though my interpretation of the medium is contemporary. How I lay, smooth, manipulate, and paddle those coils is a matter of experimentation and 25 years of experience. Coil building lends itself to extreme angles and expansive spaces, but relative humidity and gravity battle with patience and instinct to determine how far I can push the boundaries and maintain structural balance. I love to go high and wide and thin. I integrate surface pattern or color when they relate to the focus. But even then, I prefer limited use of color so the form exists to lend attention to the focal point.
Basket: Water Turtle Shells, coil-built white earthenware, oil paint, encaustic with press molds of water turtle shell, 7”H x 11”W x 11”D
AAS: While they are beautiful objects to look at, they beg to be explored. I love the way you sometimes add ‘treasures’ inside.
BS: The fun of coil-building, or hollow-building, is exploring the fourth dimension: the interior. The interior is as integral to the form as is the foot or lip because it embodies my quintessential invitation: to look inside. If left empty and expansive the interior invites the viewer to gauge the depth and breadth of the void, its surfaces and potential volume. I have seen viewers touch the inside or lean into the wide lip and spacious belly of Rim—until they see the wasp nests and read the space as claimed territory! If the interior is filled, as in Basket: Water Turtle Shells, the interior treasures and colors combine to connect viewers to memories of childhood finds, swimming in lakes, or seeing turtles sun themselves on fallen tree trunks. The found objects prompt: they call for a response. When a viewer leans into, shares a story about, or surreptitiously touches a piece, I treasure their response.
AAS: Many of your pieces incorporate press molds of all kinds of natural materials and objects. When did you start using that approach?
BS: I began the Found Object Series in 2011, presenting actual found objects on coil-built pieces finished in a white borosilicate glaze. It was hard to let go of some of my favorite finds, but it was gratifying when people were intrigued and invested in my work. Problems arose for cat-lovers: their pets couldn’t resist batting the cicadas around, shredding nests, and hiding skeletal remains. My goal was to press mold the objects. My best results came from Amazing Mold Putty, demonstrated by ceramicist Laura Jacobson during a Saturday studio session at the Arkansas Arts Center. That demo and product opened the door to my current way of working and my exploration into creating and combining multiple castings into installations.
Daubs of Dirt: An Installation, coil-built white earthenware, oil paint, encaustic with press molds of mussels, crawdads, rocks, sticks, snake and dirt dauber nests, tower: 60”H x 15”W x 15”D, tribute wall: 48”H x 72”W x 4”D
AAS: I am fascinated by Daubs of Dirt: An Installation. Would you talk about that work?
BS: Daubs of Dirt: An Installation is the first in a series of pieces co-opting sports trophy forms to award natural flora and fauna. I had observed dirt daubers and collected the nests for years: these solitary wasps are nature’s coil builders. Friends understand my predilections, and one talked her husband into saving the dauber nests he knocked down when cleaning their barn. The sheer variety of nests demanded an installation to honor dirt daubers: to award their persistence and the artistry of their industry. I slab and coil-built an approximation of the Stanley Cup hockey trophy to represent daubers achievement. The mud tower features earthbound creatures and detritus: mussels, rotted wood, crawdads, stones, bones, and a baby water snake. The tower neck features views of the backs of dauber nests, highlighting the seldom seen tiny clay coils. The tower topper, or bowl of the “trophy”, holds my most distinctive dauber nest: gift of the Montgomery’s barn and evidence of the technical virtuosity of a wasp—a dauber nest built around two exposed nails. The mud tower is framed against a formalized barn wall presenting 300+ individually molded dauber nests adhered in a celebratory swag of bunting.
Buckeyes in a Pod, coil-built white earthenware, oil paint, encaustic, 18”H x 11”W x 11”D
AAS: Buckeyes in a Pod has such a pure organic form. What attracts you to that shape?
BS: My objective is to create elegant three-dimensional forms that express my ideas. I am attracted to and predictably incorporate biomorphic lines and shapes that reflect those found in nature: the curve of a vine, swell of a seed pod, veins in a dying leaf, curl of petal, the rise of a shell. I anticipate finding a lifetime of artistic exploration in varying heights, widths, depths, and interior spaces of my “sculptural vessels”, employing the foot, belly, shoulders, and lip to lead the viewer on a mini walkabout of lines and shapes that invite contemplation of the natural world.
Buckeye Seed Pods Presented, coil-built white earthenware, oil paint, encaustic with press molds of buckeye seed pods, 16”H x 19”W x 15”D (62nd Annual Delta Exhibition)
AAS: Your gorgeous Buckeye Seed Pods Presented piece was accepted into the 62nd Delta Exhibition. As a museum curator yourself, how important are the Delta and other regional exhibition competitions to local artists?
BS: As a museum professional, university lecturer, and artist, I respect the role that competitive exhibits play over the span of a visual arts career. Professional artists are compelled to test their best efforts in competitive arenas. Deadlines spur resolve to finish or create new work for consideration. Rejections test resolve to pursue a career. Juried exhibits create a structure that positions artists to take next steps or affirm continued success: networking, media attention, interviews and critiques, solo exhibit invitations, catalogs, museum purchases, and patron connections are necessary to artistic success. The Irene Rosenzweig at the Arts and Sciences Center in Pine Bluff, and the annual competitive exhibits at the Fort Smith Regional Art Museum and the South Arkansas Arts Center have drawn submissions from numerous states for years. However, the Delta’s long-lived history of excellent curators and significant participating artists positions it as the premiere regional+ opportunity not to be missed.
Emerge, coil-built earthenware, oil paint, ,encaustic with press molds of fungi, stones, sticks, cicadas grass snake, 15”H x 18”W, 19”D
AAS: Barbara, talk about one of your new pieces, Emerge. Its organic form seems to bubble up from the ground.
BS: Emerge is my response to A Great Piece of Turf (1503), Albrecht Dürer’s slice-of-nature study highlighted against a blank background. My nature study is a composite still of the action around a hole in the ground: rocks and dirt cave in around roots and sticks, snakes hide, and fungi conceal the cicadas that have emerged from feeding on the liquid in tree roots to tap the sap of surrounding trees. The vessel defines the form of a negative space while providing the void, its rim, and the focal detail. The press-molded found objects are treated in white and earth tones to integrate softly with the white encaustic surface that serves as the blank background for the piece.
Barbara in her studio.
AAS: You are known for giving back to the artist community. Would you talk about that work and what it means to you to be such an active participant in the Arkansas art scene as a whole.
BS: When I transitioned from directing the Baum Gallery to pursue my personal work, I wanted to maintain connections to arts agencies and organizations across the state. I’ve been fortunate to contribute my experience and interests with the Arkansas Arts Council, the Committee of One Hundred to Benefit the Ozark Folk Center, and the board of the Arkansas Committee of the National Museum of Women in the Arts. I’m one of hundreds of Arkansas volunteers who contribute to the cultural life of our state and salute those who work to connect us with the arts, such as galleries, arts centers, museums and journalists who write and blog, including the Arkansas Art Scene Blog. Organizing and sharing arts experiences creates community—virtually and onsite—and I am hard-wired to appreciate those efforts and contribute to that end.
