Marie Woo Clay Odyssey: A Retrospective at Birmingham Bloomfield Art Centre

This retrospective exhibition was, in an unexpected way, a glimpse of another time and a different mindset. Marie Woo (b. 1928), active in ceramics since the 1950s and a noted teacher and curator in addition to being an active creative artist, is not the career-oriented, technically masterful potter of today. In this show, the 52 works were untitled and, more shocking, undated – other than a few labeled with a decade. Woo didn’t keep records but just enjoyed the engagement with the material and experimentation with form. And she still does. New works in the show were unfired because her kiln isn’t working; she treated that not as a limitation but as an opportunity to be playful. Small nodules of bright blue clay were adhered to wires hanging from a bamboo rod, like some odd spring buds; a chicken-wire cylinder was stuffed with ceramic rejects and topped with a bouquet of fine bamboo branches from her yard (both examples of clean-up and repurposing); a dome-shaped piece that stood