Overthrown: Clay Without Limits, Part Two

On Friday I went to the Denver Art Museum's special exhibit Marvelous Mud: Clay Around the World. This is Part Two of my highlights from the exhibition Overthrown: Clay Without Limits. 

Mille-Fleur made by Kim Dickey was the next impressive piece. It was breathtaking with the size, the beauty, and the amount of work that went into it. I should have stood in front of it to give you a sense of how large this was! I can't even guess, everything is out of proportion at the museum, but maybe 8 feet high and 14 feet long. The front and the back were covered with handmade flower shapes that were about an inch and a half square. It reminded me of French impressionists.

Tucked away in a little back room (that we almost missed) was a very interesting installation. This area was darkened, so the lights shining inside of the pieces illuminated the room. It was titled Itinerant Edens: Hermetic Garden by Walter McConnell. More than 5,500 pounds of moist clay were inside 3 plastic enclosures. The first one was the largest and had the most clay. There were a lot of flower forms and organic shapes piled on top of each other, creating a sort of environment.  You could see mold forming on some parts of the clay, striations of color and layers, it really showed some properties of clay that some people might not consider if they hadn't worked with it.

Again, to try and understand the meaning of this piece I had to look up some vocab!

From Wikipedia: An itinerant is a person who travels from place to place with no fixed home. The term comes from the late 16th century: from late Latin itinerant(travelling), from the verb itinerari, from Latin iter, itiner (journey, road).