Cat Gunn with HereIn

Cat Gunn’s fantastical ceramics appear to ooze, bubble, crackle, and boil— for static objects, they sure do seem alive. The artist’s remarkable handling of clay and glaze at once distances their practice from tradition while engaging in long-running conversations about materiality. Originally from Baltimore, Gunn is currently pursuing their MFA from the University of California San Diego. Gunn spoke with HereIn Editor Elizabeth Rooklidge about recent shifts in their work.

HereIn: You’ve made a really interesting jump in medium, from painting to ceramics, over the last few years. What led to that move?

Cat Gunn: I have this painting background, but I was really occupied with process and materiality, and alchemy of painting. I had noticed something happening in ceramics where more and more people were playing with glazes and getting into their alchemical properties.

HereIn: What does “alchemy” mean to you? Is it the same thing in ceramic as it is in painting?

Gunn: For me, in painting it was about manipulating the paint and building it up, breaking it down, making your own paint from scratch. It’s this combination of a couple of materials that then make a very magical substance— paint. It’s amazing because at the end of the day, it’s kind of just like water and stones or some kind of wet vehicle in a dry pigment. And I was an oil painter, so I could get some dry pigment, use an oil, and make my own paint. But I was more interested in when it wasn't perfectly smooth, when there would be some more organic moments in it that were a little out of my control. Letting go a bit felt liberating.

Translating that into ceramics, I can make my own glazes, but then there’s this extra process of firing in the kiln, where there’s really more of a chemical reaction. I truly won't know what I'm getting, even if I test it, because you don't know how it interacts with other glazes or the curve of a surface. Or if my fingerprints are left in it, how does the glaze catch those lines versus a very smooth surface? So it feels a lot more like playing this dangerous game of letting go and leaning into the catharsis of it.

*magician vessels*, 2021-23, ceramic and glaze, approx. 7 x 4 x 4 in. each
[Image description: Two vessels side by side. The one on the left is shaped like a traditional vase, with a long neck and flared rim. Its matte red surface is dotted with glossy drips and patches of red, yellow, and blue glaze. It sits on a craggy lump of dark blue clay. The one on the right is a similar shape, but is covered entirely in molten-like glaze in black, blue, green, and red.]

HereIn: Do you feel any tension around the idea of a ceramic tradition, in terms of the vessel, or, because you’re coming from a different background, do you not feel beholden to any of that?

Gunn: I feel like my painting background makes it easier for me to separate myself from that history. And of course when I'm working with a material, I want to acknowledge some parts of those histories as well. But it’s easier to be like, okay yes, this whole history of functional objects, I already know that’s not where I’m going. Because in a way, I read that like utilitarian versus non-utilitarian, it’s almost the same realm within painting, of figuration versus abstraction.

HereIn: How do you come to making specific forms? They’re sort of vessel-adjacent, but push so far beyond that traditional shape.

Gunn: Right now I'm playing with a few different forms— something kind of mountainous, or that echoes coral reefs or the bark of a tree. But before grad school, I was living in Baltimore City, and I was seeing layers of paint washed out over buildings, and you can see paint from decades before. And then, of course, the beautiful calligraphy that graffiti can have, with the layers of tagging. Seeing all these different layers of whatever people were painting or drawing over time was something really beautiful. It’s what I was seeing as a dog walker, or going to art openings, riding my bike— the mundane things. My first real painting series when I was finishing undergrad took a lot of inspiration from those forms. I was playing a lot with adding mediums to my oil paint to make it more fluid, and I could get these long, smooth squiggle gestures that I would layer on each other. I’d use a power sander to go back into them, and it made the squiggles blend together and there was a lot of play of not being able to discern what was on top or what was behind. I feel like I still play with layers like that in a lot of ways, but with glazes they can melt into each other and sometimes separate layers begin to become the same layer, and sometimes they stay so separate. I’ve experimented with sanding glazes, but right now I’m more into an additive process, and at a point it stops reading as just layers of glazes and becomes this otherly texture phenomenon that seems reminiscent of natural textures.

But I've always had this fascination with watching nature documentaries, especially when it's about the rainforest or coral reefs, those really overly saturated colors. They are just so rich that it almost feels like they can't exist in nature. I used a lot of bright colors in my paintings, so it felt natural to begin working in ceramics with a similar color palette. In ceramics, I feel like the colors always bring me more to these tropical environments I’m looking to. In painting, there was also this fascination with the digital realm and those unreal colors that can appear on a tv or computer screen, especially as someone who grew up playing a lot of video games. I'm interested in ways of layering glaze and the natural patterning of how things crawl and crackle, or capturing the suspension of the drip. I also love how, kind of like painting, there's just so much reward in getting up close and looking at them, because otherwise you don't see those finer details. It’s like finding an Easter egg or something.

And something I'm thinking about for my grad school thesis is how, as my identity shifts as an artist, I can have something that allows me to be more of an interdisciplinary maker. Ceramics is very new and I feel like painting is how I’ve always viewed the world and moved through it. That was such a great place for me to start understanding world-building, like creating a portal to another realm. How can I make that more of a bodily, 3D, in-the-round experience? Ceramics have been a good gateway to get into sculpture.

HereIn: Many of your titles draw from your heritage— you include references to figures from Filipino folklore, fruit used in Filipino cooking, or the name of a specific island in the Philippines. How does your familial history influence your work, both materially and conceptually?

Gunn: Well, I feel like in more recent years, I began contemplating my Filipino heritage. I feel like I realized that I didn’t know that much about “being Filipino,” which sounds loaded but for me it’s like reflecting on not having ever been to the Philippines, not knowing the maternal side of my family, not knowing how to speak Tagalog, etc. I’m beginning to realize that my mom may have felt a lot of pressure to assimilate when she moved to the U.S., so maybe it felt better for her to raise children in a way that was more whitewashed. My mom also grew up in poverty in Manila, so even when I try to look up familial records on databases, nothing comes up and I wonder if it’s because her family was poor. There’s this whole other half of my life that could’ve had more content but it didn’t, so I feel like my art practice has become this space where I can search for or even create these connections. Not searching in a way of looking for specific answers, but searching in a sense of just being able to dream up endless possibilities.

I also am treading carefully because if my mom is my only lifeline to this information, I feel like I’m trying to navigate how I can ask her about her life without retraumatizing. The few bits of new info I get usually become my next gesture. For example, I found out my lola might have worked in a cannery that was specific to jackfruit, so now I’m working on creating a plaster jackfruit mold so I can make ceramic jackfruits. Food is so powerful in the way that it can help us feel connected no matter where we are in the world, and it’s also common to offer to your ancestors. I know people usually make offerings of real fruit at graves and altars, but I think there’s something beautiful about the labor that goes into an offering that may never expire. My practice has also become this place of making offerings and honoring these relatives. Lately I find myself asking questions like, “Now that I know you, how can I honor you?”

This conversation has been edited by HereIn and the artist for length and clarity.

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