Municipal Bonds is pleased to announce Generative Earth: Solange Roberdeau and Nick Schwartz, an exhibition of new drawings and ceramic vessels, on view from February 3 through March 23, 2024. Presenting these two Northern California-based artists' works together for the first time, the exhibition explores their inherent connection to place, craft, and elements of the natural world. In their individual practices, both lean into the dynamic environment of Mendocino County for materials, process, and reflection. 

Solange Roberdeau's drawings were made in part by a natural phenomenon: the varying rhythms of the wind pushing over and through the branches of towering redwood trees that surround her cabin in the hills. With wind as the beginning and formal anchor for each of these works, this series is a small tribute to the generative and nonhuman earth that she asserts humans are in a reciprocal, participatory, and interdependent relationship. 

Roberdeau grounded her pieces in wind prints using suminagashi. Suminagashi or "floating ink," the traditional Japanese craft of water marbling, is a highly sensitive technique due to its water substrate having none of the added thickeners of Western Marbling. This makes for an animate and receptive conductor for all movements in the environment around it. To create a suminagashi print, sumi ink is floated on the surface of water and a piece of paper is carefully pressed onto this surface to arrive at a unique image. 

As with the surface of any body of water, the smallest sound, breath, or gesture sends trembles across the inky top and it begins to move. Confined to the 3 x 3 foot metal tray that Roberdeau used as her printing receptacle, the water and ink began to echo the bounds of their container, bumping into the sides and wrapping around the inner edges, circling back in spirals and layers of minute lines. The stronger the gust of wind, the more spaces opened in the floating ink, which translate into voids of white paper in the final prints.

A painted circle is Roberdeau's quiet gesture of self upon these windscapes. Akin to a handprint, she was drawn to the circle for its ubiquitousness and universality of form: a circle is continuous energetic movement, a spiral, infinity. It is an oculus and a point of focus; a meditative gesture and a symbolic representation of our planet and the cosmos.

While Roberdeau was making this series, she thought about basic elements: form and color, wind and light. She worked with the wind in monochrome to point to the forms its movements made on the surface of the water, quick gusts swirling with almost inaudible atmosphere. By contrast, she chose a palette of colors for the circles that she painted, while thinking about light, the visible spectrum, and the complex sensorial and emotional relationships organisms have to color. In the improvisational phases of the compositions, she added large areas of gold leaf, the inert and luminous metal that seems to produce its own warm light and bring the sky down to the earth. 

Nick Schwartz lives in the woods near the Pacific Ocean, in a forest scarred by fire. The earth rumbles deep beneath his home and the hills are constantly in motion. Much of his time is spent collecting and processing wood for kiln firings, meandering his way from task to task, contentedly working with the land around him. As he quiets down after a busy day, he often finds himself singling out distant sounds: echoes of waves, the buoy marking the harbor entrance, the ocean breeze high in the redwoods surrounding his home. He imagines himself insignificant in the midst of such immense power and beauty as that of the North Coast of California.  

As part of his practice, Schwartz chooses materials for his ceramics which connect him to his "place." He uses clay from his land, and firewood which comes from trees that have stood strong, some for up to 2000 years, acting as sentinels which protect him and his family from the harsh winds and strong summer heat. He uses clay which has been weathered from rock, in natural processes spanning hundreds of thousands of years, and trees which have seen so much destruction and development in their time. 

By heating his clay vessels in large, handbuilt anagama kilns that are fired to temperatures exceeding 2400 degrees Fahrenheit, Schwartz mimics tectonic processes and in essence turns the clay from its moist malleable form into a rock again. Throughout, he layers wood ash on his pieces and buries them in mineral rich embers, which first melt to form glass, and then solidify on the work after they cool down. This entire process can take up to two weeks.

Schwartz likes to think of his works as modern fossils of everything that his materials were part of in their lives. He looks to honor these materials, which have come to him by way of a strong wind storm or excavation around his property. In his woodfired ceramics, he hopes to preserve their essence—providing both beauty and contemplation of humanity's place among the trees, hills, and oceans.

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