Josh Cloud: Hewn in Blue — Josh Cloud

Cloud works in ceramic and glaze, sometimes pushed toward the look of stone, from rough concrete to smooth river rock, and sets it against carved wood. The stone is a fabrication, and so a wish: for something durable, something to build on or hide behind. No wonder, then, that a good deal of the works can be read as masks: faces made solid, held between the self and the world.

Cloud’s figures answer that wish with softness. They begin in a sketchbook as cartoonish self-portraits, then are inflated into soft, exaggerated volumes that explore identity, queerness, and intimacy: what we present, what we protect, and what we let be seen. Against inherited ideas of masculinity, a role handed down and worn, they present openness as a form of strength. Their aged surfaces place them between art object and artifact, as if weathered into being, and like masks they both cover and reveal. The works continue Cloud’s Sunken Bust series, in which he broke figurative sculptures down into basic shapes and rebuilt them in his own style. His attention has since shifted to headpieces and amalgams that stand in for a figure’s inner workings, drawing equally from Black and African sculptural traditions and from the queer language of camp and the theatrics and joy of live drag, where the self is built by hand and worn in public. Many of the figures are inspired by face jugs made by enslaved African Americans in South Carolina’s Edgefield District in the nineteenth century.

Cloud places himself in a lineage of artists for whom care for material is inseparable from meaning: Thaddeus Mosley, who carves salvaged timber by hand into balanced, stacked forms; Alison Saar, whose figures are clad in found metal and carry diasporic history in their surfaces; Akinsanya Kambon, whose ceramic figuration holds Black American and African history; and Wangechi Mutu, whose hybrid bodies are assembled from disparate parts into something whole. What they share, and what Cloud takes from them, is the conviction that how a thing is made is what it means.

Alongside the fabricated rock and carved wood, water runs through the exhibition in every state it takes. “Cairn” is a creek sliding over stones. “Flood Plain” is water in its fury: a mudslide or an endless storm. “Cambium” is a boat on dangerous waters, at once delicate and strong. “Improvisational Assembly II” is the seabed, where objects are bound together by chance and time. “Weeping Stone” is rain and the strength it takes to not be washed away.

The water is blue, but the blue came first, out of instinct and chance. Cloud mixed most of the glazes from scratch, so no two figures share a shade. Blue is also the blues of the 1960s, the music he turns to for solace and for its example of what it costs to bare one’s soul in public, and the color of a year spent working through diagnosed depression and considerable loss. His grandmother passed away while the works were underway, altering the tone of his final pieces and the palette he used to glaze them. Thus the title, Hewn in Blue: if we are hewn by what we live through, grief, joy, play, and heartbreak alike, how much of the shaping is done to us, and how much do we do ourselves? Works Josh Cloud, Angel,