Anti-ceramicist Beverly Semmes’s squashy, expertly malformed sculptures respond to the long history of ceramics and the male gaze, in which pots’ smooth curves and receptive structure often symbolized the female form. Fleshy and impractical, Semmes’s Sketchpot series, responds in clay to femininity and its representation.
Her new works are on show at the Carnegie International, the oldest and longest running exhibition of contemporary art in North America, and the second oldest in the world (after the Biennale in Venice). The fifty-seventh edition asks what it means to be an “international artist” in an increasingly globalised context, where local difference is flattened out by homogenous culture and taste. Semmes is among thirty-two artists on show this year.
