The present work, Overgrown, is indicative of Kathy Butterly’s quirky, but elegant style. Butterly developed her art by taking cues from George Ohr’s twisted and pinched shapes, the Funk aesthetic of 1960s San Francisco, and the revolutionary California Clay Movement surrounding the likes of Ron Nagle and Ken Price, which saw ceramists destroy the boundaries between art and craft. Butterly started out by making curvaceous wheel-thrown vessels that evoked the female body, but since the 1990s she has been working with cast forms. Much of this work still echoes her earlier experiments focusing on human anatomy. Each object has a unique physiology and anthropomorphic vitality.

To create Overgrown, Butterly began with a cylinder of wet clay, which she folded, poked, collapsed, and twisted until a semblance of bodily presence was achieved. Next, she introduced a sculpted plinth and feet as well as other ornamental appendages. A bulbous aquamarine-coloured body is topped with two leafy bushes whilst an orange line seductively curls from an opening on the object’s side. All of this appears to precariously teeter above a small table whose surface is glazed to resemble a cartoonish woodgrain. Plush vegetation grows from underneath the table top, as if pushing the alien thing above it off kilter – perhaps a visual joke evoking the piece’s title. As is characteristic of Butterly’s work, Overgrown uses vague references that float somewhere between abstraction and reified form to create enigmatic associations, like a sculptural liaison between Eileen Agar’s hat and a Chinese scholar’s rock (a Gongshi).

Each object taking up to nine months to create, Butterly’s sculptures require time, patience, and multiple firings to achieve their range of colours and complex configurations. Everything appears in movement, as if the work could bend, unfurl, or metamorphosise at any moment. Overgrown communicates directly with its viewer to elicit emotional responses that can range from affection for its two green pompoms that rise like the ears of a teddy bear to derision or sympathy toward its awkward, wriggling body. Butterly has explained that her work represents the diversity of humanity and the way each of us chooses to maneuver our way through life. Armed with whimsical humour and paradoxical grace, Overgrown analyses and communicates the existential questions we often ask ourselves: who or what am I and what will others think of me?

-Margaret J. Schmitz