Lasting Impressions
Margie
Hughto likes to get her hands into her work. Inside her
studio, you might find Hughto up to her elbows in a batch
of paper pulp, shaping 200 pounds of wet clay, pressing
handmade paper with a visiting artist, firing up a kiln,
or working with her student assistants on a large public
art project. “I love mushy materials like paper pulp
and clay,” says Hughto, a ceramics professor who has
taught in the College of Visual and Performing Arts for
more than 30 years. “I’m really physical with
my work.”
As an
internationally recognized artist, Hughto is known for her
richly textured and colorful ceramic wall reliefs and paintings,
and ceramic tile murals, which she added to her repertoire
in 1995. “I like collaging, putting together things
with lots of parts,” she says. “I work totally
intuitively and like to just let things happen. It’s
like having a pile of toys to piece together.”
Hughto’s
creations are built for the long haul, too. As evidence,
look at Seasons, her large-scale ceramic painting
that has adorned a Buffalo subway stop since 1985 and is
“as beautiful today as the first day it went in,”
she says. Then there’s Trade, Treasure, and Travel,
a panorama of 12 interconnected ceramic murals that range
up to 30 feet in length and feature such images as ships,
keys, coins, and even a bear and a bull. The piece, commissioned
by New York City’s Metropolitan Transit Authority,
was installed in 1998 at the Cortlandt Street subway station,
two levels beneath the World Trade Center. “After September
11th, I didn’t know for months if it was OK,”
Hughto says. “When I finally got a look at it, it was
like going into King Tut’s tomb. There was all this
art—and not a scratch on it.” That, she likes
to say, is “the power of ceramics.”
Hughto
is captivated by the immediacy and fluidity of working with
clay and the way it transforms in a kiln and interacts with
glazes. “You can move clay around, press it, and play
with it,” she says. “If you don’t like what
you’ve done, you can do it again.” Hughto draws
inspiration from clay’s connection to ancient civilizations
and the natural world, and often incorporates these themes
into her art. She likes to embed materials or make impressions
in clay, using everything from wisteria, fern, and oak leaves
to fossils, gems, minerals, and heavy metals. She roams
antique shops in search of objects that catch her fancy
and keeps an eclectic collection of items in her home studio
for research or future projects. “I’ve really
taken to buying rocks these days,” Hughto says. “I
go to all these gem and mineral shows and come home with
boxes of rocks.”
And
whether she is grappling with a commissioned site-specific
piece or experimenting with glaze colors for an exhibition
work, her art remains very much in the public eye. She recently
fabricated a coral reef and elements of the Earth and moon
for part of an expansive mural of the solar system at the
Natural History Museum subway station at 81st Street in
Manhattan, and produced an Egyptian-themed entrance to the
Blodgett Elementary School library in Syracuse. She was
also one of 40 artists selected to contribute to Visionary
Ceramics, a show that will open in 2004 at the Cleveland
Museum of Art. Yet, even with all her success and knowledge,
Hughto admits clay and glazes still hold a sense of mystery
for her. “No matter how long you’ve been in this
business,” she says, “when you open a kiln, you’re
never sure what’s in there.
—Jay
Cox
