Arlene Shechet, A Night Out, 2011, and Y Wabi N, 2007

Arlene Shechet: My name is Arlene Shechet, and I'm a sculptor. 

Narrator: Shechet has two works in this display of works made in ceramics. They’re called A Night Out and Y Wabi N. 

Arlene Shechet: The beauty of ceramics was that whatever I put on the surface and I fired became completely part of the structure of the piece. That's so unique to that material, to fire something in, so that the form and the surface are literally one thing. 

One of the things that clay presented to me was that it needed to be hollow in order to be fired. Its hollowness was extremely attractive to me because it felt like it was a void around a breath, or a void that contained the breath. Sometimes when I was making those early pieces, I was even thinking about them being inhales or exhales. It was at a time when my father had congestive heart failure. I would spend days with him, and then come and work on these pieces, where I was painfully and sublimely aware of my ability to breathe, and what was happening with the materials as I thought of them being puffed up or deflated through breath.    

Narrator:  A Night Out is a blue form, placed on top of two block forms, one of which sits off-center on top of the other. 

Arlene Shechet: I had always been thinking about, whatever I make, what does it sit on? How does it live in the world? The precariousness of the assemblage that I put together for that piece to sit atop is very related to me experiencing the precariousness of life and death, and our basic position in the world of not knowing, and trying to feel stability in an inherently unstable life.