Arlene Shechet’s recent glazed ceramic objects float, twist, and puff-up atop stacks of unadorned concrete, plaster, wood, and steel. While Shechet has worked in sculpture for over two decades, these new works shift away from her earlier explorations of iconographic Buddhist imagery toward more abstract forms and combinations. Confounding any single reading, they hover in the fertile space between East and West, secular and sacred, and modern and ancient. Shechet’s modeled surfaces demonstrate how clay mirrors the artist’s touch. Her objects bear the mark and memory of her hands. The sculpture’s bulges, hollows, spouts, and holes evoke bodily features and, as the artist notes, are “suggestive of the curving forms found in classical Indian sculpture.”

- Read the full text from A Dialogue with Arlene Shechet by Ian Berry