Driven by risk and experimentation, Saskatchewan artist, Jody Greenman-Barber, creates works that are technically and conceptually challenging, beautiful and whimsical, chaotic and wild.ⁱ Recognized for her contributions in contemporary ceramics, Greenman-Barber’s artistic practice is multi-disciplinary, having worked in sculpture, drawing, video, photography, installation and performance to create works that record and convey embodied sensations through form. The exhibition, Flow, presents two bodies of works: Dancing the Boondangle (2016-2019) and The Making of Meaning (2021-2025). Both series reflect Greenman-Barber’s enduring drive for innovative experimentations in clay, leading her to push her medium to its limits to a point of collapse and challenge its traditional conventions, begging the question, when is the form no longer a vessel?

Dancing the Boondangle presents large scale sculptures in playful exchange with a series of drawings on paper and ceramic plates, each offering whimsical, abstracted forms that allude to the body in motion and improvised expression. These works are an evolution in Greenman-Barber’s exploration of gestural forms that are “animated and emotionally-charged”,ⁱⁱ an expression of bodily movement translated or contextualized through her chosen media, in the swirling markmaking of the drawings and through the plasticity of the clay and performance of the sculptural forms. As in previous bodies of work – presented in the exhibitions Mimesis (2013) and Sensory Space (2015) – she draws her inspiration from contemporary dance and improvisation to explore movement and expression experienced in and through the body, exploring the body as vessel. Broadening her past inquiries into the ceramic vessel as deconstructed, “unravelling” forms, the sculptures in Dancing the Boondangle are an experiment in scale, colour and construction, built from a series of repetitive, spiraling lines, of wheel-thrown, ribbon-like strips and rounded coils of fired porcelain that are “woven in rhythmic and complex arrangements to express the fluidity of (captured) movement in space”.ⁱⁱⁱ Presented as paired forms on round pedestals, the sculptures are performative and in exchange through their inward leans and outward stretches - together they dialogue and dance.

The Making of Meaning features new ceramic works that are playful and even fantastical in form. Greenman-Barber began this series during the shutdown of the COVID-19 pandemic as pure whimsy, a means to make herself laugh. It is also interesting to note that at that time she, herself, was incapable of movement while recovering from an injury, sparking a shift in her practice from working with large-scale gesture to more intimate, delicate, handcrafted work. Taking inspiration from the textures of design and the natural world, she has translated small textural details in clay to then pierce into, built up on and overwhelm foundational vessel forms. The resulting organic and quirky textures are reminiscent of deep-sea corals, porcupine quills, and plant and microscopic human biology. Here, again, she pushes her materials to utmost extremes of fragility, perhaps suggesting an intrinsic fragility of life, to defy the confines or conventions of the vessel form. She redefines or imagines new possibilities for the anatomy or structure of these sublime vessels, which inherently relate to the human body, through lip, neck, body and foot.

Greenman-Barber’s work is the result of more than a twenty-five year studio practice that is multi-disciplinary, process-based and experimental, driven by risk and an interest in advancing technique and expression.^iv She has made and continues to make important contributions to contemporary ceramics through her practice by interrogating and stretching the meaning, content, and material possibilities of ceramic processes and forms.

Jennifer McRorie, Curator


i. Jody Greenman-Barber, Artist Statement for Dancing the Boondangle, unpublished.

ii. Ibid.

iii. Ibid.

iv. Ibid.