‘Certainly Sculpture’ ceramic show

MONSON — This is the first time that the Gascoine Gallery, a 30- by 40-foot gallery space on Monson Pottery’s second floor at 16 Greenville Road, has featured a ceramic sculpture show, although it’s the fourth year offering fine art exhibitions. The show runs through Dec. 31, 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesday through Sunday.

Jemma Gascoine wanted to present a show that honored the art medium that has so inspired her personally these last 21 years. The work on view is designed and executed by five skilled but very different ceramic artists from around Maine and Vermont.

Jeffrey Ackerman’s large arabesque terracotta sculptures depict psychic or metaphysical dramas rather than events. He believes that all of nature is an oscillation between creation and destruction. His characters and the stories they inhabit are metaphors of creativity and metamorphosis. His style and imagery fuses operatic and Baroque fantasy with archaic stylization.

Anne Alexander’s work is organic in form inspired by small nature specimens such as marine life and plant pods. Her work expresses themes of growth, life cycles and stages, regeneration, and sexuality. She investigates connections between our surrounding environment and the human body. The driving theme of her work is exploring and enhancing the spiritual and physical connection to the natural world.

Randy Fein’s amusing brownstone house facades and cookie jars cast back to her youth in the lower east side of Manhattan. She confides that over her four decade art career her “hands have been her tools,” that she pinches, pushes and presses clay “seeking to discover the life hidden within a shapeless lump of mud.”

Rebecca Hillman enjoys diving into different surfaces, clay bodies and firing techniques. Sometimes she throws and does functional vessels and sometimes she hand-builds with a pension toward something from nature, figurative or a garden theme. Many of her pieces in the show feature insects.

Kathy Weinberg’s 13 painted quirky clay-reliefs on historic themes and characters are reminiscent of intimate 18h century Dutch conversation paintings. She began the body of work including “Icarus” and “Oedipus consults the Oracle”, during COVID lockdown. The intricate tableaus encourage the viewer to lean in ever more closely to inspect.

A “Meet the Artist” opening will be Friday, July 21 from 5-7 p.m.