10 Questions With… Chris Gustin

My father supplied all the files for the L.A. Country Museum when they built their new facility on Wilshire. Edith Heath was a good family friend. My dad’s company funded Heath Ceramics when she and Brian started the factory.

When I was 16, I got interested in handmade pots, and took some classes. Then, I went to University of California Irvine, and the first teacher I had was John Mason, who was one of the leaders of the clay movement in the 50s and 60s. I spent two or three semesters there, and then one of my dad’s factories in Pasadena needed help. It was small, and I worked there as a summer job, but the guy who was running it got very serious cancer and died in a few months. So, I ended up taking over. My brother was a painter and sat me down one day and said: “Look, if you stay here in this factory, you’re gonna die here. This will be your life.” He talked me into going to Alfred University for grad school, and I set up a studio in Connecticut. This was the late 1970s and I wanted to be a studio potter.

ID: What was the relationship between the design and art worlds at that time?

CG: I tried all the craft shows, and was rejected from everything. And then, I had a little show at a gallery on 57th Street in New York. Painting was getting out of the financial ability for a lot of people to buy, so collectors started to turn to clay. Conversations were about taking historical pottery as a starting place and then pushing against that. My work was always vessel-based, until the last ten years or so, but the boundary of the vessel was this interesting playground. You could deal with abstraction, you could deal with scale, and you could deal with all these things that had nothing to do with utility, but it still referenced the history those objects came out of.

ID: How did you come to realize that, in some sense, you could call something a vessel and that made it one?

CG: Well, I’ve spent my whole career looking at ceramic history. I love how cultures imbue meaning in really utilitarian forms. They didn’t have to paint the hell out of a pot in order to use it, but they put all this stuff on them which told about their daily lives, their religious lives, their cultural experiences. Why do humans want to do that? Why do we embellish? The vessel is the only art form that deals with volume, and volume is damn powerful. It doesn’t take much for a pot to be a really great pot, or to be an average one. We recognize when something is alive rather than stagnant. My early work with pots was about taking iconic forms like the tea pot or jar and pushing the meaning so that function falls away.

ID: And then it seems like the identity of the vessel became less central to your work—what changed?

CG: In the late 90s and early 2000s, two things happened. I built a big wood kiln for my students. I put my own work in it, but I wasn’t happy with how things were coming in. At the same time, my brother was diagnosed with MS. I’d visit him and as his disease went downhill, we’d have these real, kind of life conversations. I was stunned at his ability to let go. He had an incredible ability to do that with grace and compassion and love. These conversations went into my studio work.

There’s power in just getting down to an essence, and letting go of certain moves. I was doing a talk and had a slide show, projecting a tea bowl 25 feet tall on a screen and I thought in my head: Wow, that would be great if it were four feet tall. You know? So I started taking the forms I was making small-scale and blowing them up big scale. That changed my work in the wood kiln. It changed how I thought about vessels and brought figuration into a kind of one-to-one relationship with the viewer. You meet it in a different way. I was intrigued about this switch of pottery thinking, which is all about picking something up, into something where you need three people to pick it up. It was such a simple move. And such a radical move.

ID: Did this make the actual construction of your pieces more of a collaborative undertaking?

CG: Well, the technique went from throwing to a combined throwing and hand-building, and now it’s all engineering. It’s basically using medieval architectural techniques. A lot of arches. What became interesting was the glazing. When I started doing pieces three to five feet tall, all of a sudden I had real estate that I’d never had before. I purposefully over-fire my glazes. I want them to move. So there’s a sense of the vessel as a metaphor for the body, but also one for landscape topography. As glaze moves over these curvy forms, you can get a drip to go four feet, and it leaves a trail. These trails are doors into other universes. I glaze pretty much from a monochromatic point of view, where the variation comes from atmosphere and the wood kiln and how glaze responds to wood ash. So there’s a lot of breakup and activity and color shifts. The idea of putting yourself in a position where the outcome is just out of reach is a space I really like being in.

ID: Why?

CG: The idea of uncertainty is really powerful. Sometimes, I run through pieces four or five times to build up color and surface. A piece could go into the kiln with a dark glaze, but it doesn’t work, and so I’ll put a light glaze on top and run it through—this idea of being in the unknown isn’t frivolous. Out of it comes a whole realm of possibility if you’re turned in without judgement. The body of work I’m starting now is jumping scale to like 12 feet. The risk is invigorating. There’s a kind of rush in being willing to fail. As an artist who’s been around for awhile, it’s easy to get to a place where you kind of just replicate you. I’m 73, and when you get into your 70s you start what my wife and I call rephrase the time remaining. So I’m going to do all this now, because in five years I may not be able to work on that scale. I’ve had a great career of showing all over the place. It’s fine to take risks now. These might just end up in a field, right? I kind of don’t care. I just want to see what I can do with it.

ID: How did you first connect with Donzella?

CG: Well, I have a former student, Rosanne Sniderman, who does Deadhead tours with Paul Donzella, and said he really liked my work. So, we had a conversation and I decided to go for it. My whole career has mostly been white box galleries. The idea of being in a design showroom was, well, I kind of had to get over it because, you’ve got to remember, I grew up in this world of design marts with thirty showrooms and everybody is just walking around. But, the idea of having my work juxtaposed with objects that come out of that world was fabulous; it gave context about how you live with things.

Early on, a dealer told me a great piece of advice for a young artist: Every time you make a good series of work, just pull one and stick it somewhere. I’ve done that over my career, so now I have a big storage container of archive work. What’s interesting about showing with Paul is that he understands the power of objects and it doesn’t matter if it was made ten years ago or twenty years ago. If it resonates, he wants to show it. So, he came and looked at everything and he made choices to build a show that was playing off the language of vessels, the moments when they talk to each other.

ID: The Cloud Series seems to push you in a new direction—what was its inspiration?

CG: In 2014, I did a residency in Montana, and when I do residencies I always feel like it’s kind of stupid to make the same stuff I would make at home. So, I use them as a place of play with real intention. I wanted to play with scale, and I realized all the pieces I was making started with the potter’s wheel circle. Ok, I’ll start with an oval! It doesn’t seem like a big move, but all of a sudden you have a front and back and sides. As I went up in scale, I was trying to put some type of historical ceramic pottery context to them as a vessel. It was just killing me. I could not figure it out. And then, I realized: they don’t want to be vessels. They want to be closed. As an artist, my whole identity had been tied up with the vessel as a conversation. This was dealing with different concerns, which was an interesting psychological space to jump into. It became an open door to curiosity.

ID: And what else came through that open door?

CG: The Spirit Series is where I wanted to go much bigger, as big as would fit the kiln. Some of the pieces were kind of boxy. They’re just big figures, and they took on personas. They’re caricatures of the human condition, almost mythological figures. A friend calls them my Monsters, but in a benevolent, what you see in the dark but won’t hurt you way. In the glazing, a drip comes down and hangs there, like an exclamation. There are moments where the viewer can find something up close that they can’t find from ten feet away.

ID: So you want people to really get up and personal with them?

CG: If the dealers would allow it, I’d love people to just rub the hell of them, you know? I love that intention of wanting to touch. I did a show at the Milwaukee Art Museum and they had to put a guard in front of my work to keep people from touching it. With the big vessels, people want to sing into them, to lean in and hear their voice. When somebody wants to engage in a way where they get personally connected to an object through their own intention, that’s really powerful.

Chris Gustin: Ascension is on view at Donzella Ltd. through July 5, 2025.