Archive Project 14: Charles Timm-Ballard

Rebecca McGrew's Essay | Images from the Exhibition Charles Timm-Ballard Home Page | Archive - Spring 2002 Home

The Project Series
Project 14: Charles Timm-Ballard

Charles Timm-Ballard brings together the traditions of painting and ceramics to make landscapes of earthen materials fused into slabs. The tension of his work derives from the interplay between the earthbound, sculptural quality of ceramics and the more ethereal realm of landscape painting. For this exhibition, Charles Timm-Ballard presented ten new works that investigate the impact of human activity on the local environment.

Timm-Ballard, who taught ceramics at Pomona College, has always been interested in dealing simultaneously with formal, aesthetic concerns and with current social and political issues. His content skirts the conventions of landscape painting, focusing on the boundaries between beauty and devastation. Going beyond the use of painterly glazes of ceramic art to evoke nostalgic response to the beauty of nature, the artist employs them to examine seriously the impact of our actions on the earth.

Timm-Ballard says that he is attracted to the challenge of making landscape images out of “fused, feldspathic ceramic material, the stuff that 98% of the earth is made up of,” and works toward achieving a rich luminosity with ceramic glazes. Through a process that is almost alchemical, he literally transforms earth—minerals, mud, rocks—into landscape images built up by means layers of porcelain, stoneware slip, rust, and chunks of slag. After an initial firing, this becomes the surface he then inscribes, drawing images and geometric divisions, and pressing in plant roots to create the tree-like forms of the finished landscapes. Using the kiln as a painting tool, he layers glazes and metal oxides in sequential firings until he achieves the desired level and depth of color.

Since Timm-Ballard’s recent move from the Midwest to Southern California, his work has shifted from exploring urban industrial landscapes to a focus on the local environment and its dilemmas, particularly air pollution. The hazy light of Southern California and the refracting nature of the particulate matter in smog create breathtaking colors, but they also demonstrate the destructive influence of human activity on the environment. The simultaneously beautiful and sickly luminous gray-greens of Timm-Ballard’s newest slabs suggest this dichotomy.

The exhibition of work by Charles Timm-Ballard was the fourteenth in the Pomona College Museum of Art’s Project Series, an ongoing program of small exhibitions that brings to the campus art that is experimental and that introduces new forms, techniques, or concepts.

Rebecca McGrew
Curator