Lil Spice (SO446), 2016, glazed ceramic, 7 x 11 x 15 inches, all images courtesy NIAD
Blizzard, 2016, glazed ceramic, 14 x 16 x 10 inches
Kitten (S2378), 2018, glazed ceramic, 9 x 10 x 6 inches
Drawing inspiration from diverse interests - including animals and the environment, identity, family history, and civil rights activism, Dorrie Reid’s disarming works reflect a joyful approach to art-making. Endlessly imaginative, her artistic practice becomes a natural extension of memory and personal experience.
Born and raised in the Bay Area, Reid was first introduced to art-making early on in school, primarily through drawing. Reid currently attends NIAD’s studio three days a week, where she has worked across a wide range of media over the past two decades. Recurring themes for Reid are significant seasons and times of year, as well as numerous iterations of the Black Panther slogan “All Power to the People,” realized as text-based prints, drawings, and elaborate quilts.
While Reid will sometimes produce functional vessels, her focus lies largely in playful ceramic depictions of exotic African mammals, wildcats, lop-eared rabbits, kittens, and horses. Incredibly evocative, this standout body of work carries the viewer through a shifting spectrum of wild personalities and emotional impressions: drowsy, startled, forlorn, cheerful, listless, rabid. Often both charming and unsettling, these objects bring to mind Ramesh Mario Nithiyendran’s ceramic monkeys, while also sharing remarkable similarities with Raquel Albarran’s vibrant tableaus. Asymmetrical facial structures and emblematic features remain consistent throughout - bulging eyeballs, undulating lips, flaring nostrils, and lolling tongues.
Working primarily from memory, her chosen subjects serve as initial guides for the art-making process, which seems to favor the exploration of materials and ideas surrounding a particular animal, rather than accurate representation. Occasionally she will use source imagery to mimic the coat markings of wildcats or distinctive horse stars and blazes.
From a series of horse busts given titles such as Rosemary, Cinnamon, and Blizzard, Lil Spice slouches forward and its face crumples inward. Dappled in glossy green, purple, and blue, a fleshy bubblegum tongue crudely curls and protrudes from its misshapen mouth. An untitled orange giraffe’s eyes are wreathed in lustrous, jet-black eyelashes resembling inky flower petals. Its narrow and elongated muzzle almost transforms into the curved neck and bill of a duck. Partially influenced by her own cats (Romeo and Marilyn), an ongoing smaller scale series of kittens appear to tumble in various states of play, with paws outstretched and tails lovingly “shaped to give them different characters.”
Chelsea Smith, a facilitator who has worked closely with Reid at NIAD, shares valuable insight into her daily creative process in the studio:
Dorrie's timeline with ceramics is usually pretty fast-paced, when the scale of them is taken into account. For example, her recent ceramic portrait of Donna Summer took about a month (four working days, one day in ceramics a week). It often takes me longer to find the space for it in the kiln! I would guess a horse would be maybe even less, from what I remember in the past. Two or three weeks possibly. Dorrie likes to work very physically with clay and quickly. She's not someone that wants to focus on small details in ceramics or work with tools. She's very gestural and spontaneous. Often the work might start as a portrait of one animal or singer or politician and then morph into another portrait.
Dorrie's ceramics and textiles are certainly related, both in styles and subject matter. She does seem to have more energy to work longer term on her textile pieces than ceramics, although that could be the nature of the materials. I think mark-making and texture are really important in both.
Reid’s process is an intensive, manual inquiry which pulls the form outward in order to articulate delightfully imperfect components, their scale defined by her grasp as the soft clay moves through her hands. Mouths are agape and frequently ringed by splayed teeth; possibly she imagines the idea of teeth as they are manifested, then leaves them projecting outward as a record of this exploration. Paying close attention to the surface texture, Reid then re-examines the form through methods of mark-making. She pinches, gouges, or pushes broad grooves into the clay with her fingers, and in the case of a horse’s mane or cheetah’s spots, incises finer lines using a needle tool. Typically working on a few pieces simultaneously, this improvisational manipulation of the clay is followed by rapid, painterly applications of glaze.
Born in 1957, Dorrie Reid has maintained a studio practice at NIAD Art Center in Richmond, California since 2003. Reid has an upcoming solo exhibition of ceramic works in April at Kapp Kapp in Philadelphia. She has shown previously in CE x CG x NIAD at Minnesota Street Projects in San Francisco, ¡Trio! at Roll Up Project in Oakland, Thread Heads at the Berkeley Art Center, and extensively in exhibitions at NIAD, including Hailing From Parts Unknown organized By Curtis Turner, Guerneville organized By Gerasimos Floratos and Ross Simonini, Cyrano organized By Em Kettner, Give A Little Take A Little: Real Time & Space organized By Lexa Walsh, and Peaceable Kingdom: The Creatures of Dorrie Reid, among others.