Liisa Nelson: Dreams, Resident Artist Exhibition, January 15 – March 30, Jill Bonovitz Gallery at The Clay Studio
Liisa Nelson shares the inspiration behind her works for an exhibition at The Clay Studio.
This year, I am the same age my mother was when she was pregnant with me. My life is different from hers and even more different from what I envisioned for my life as a child. I’ve been asking myself what my childhood dreams were built on—tracing their origins, which layers are mine and which were absorbed from my family, media, or societal influences around me. Many of those dreams have materialized, and others have slipped away with time. At present, I bridge the past and the future with gratitude, holding all the layers of the sorrow of loss and the joy of countless gifts life has brought me so far. I wonder what the mists of the future will usher in. In this tumultuous political era, I also find myself asking: What are the collective dreams of humanity? What do the stories, myths, and symbols that have endured the waves of history reveal about our fundamental desires and values?
I often go walking at night with my dog, usually in the woods or on the back streets. I work a lot at night, too. In the darkness, the busy, known world recedes with its concerns for surface-level affairs, and another layer opens: a place of quiet, reflection, mystery, and reprieve from the responsibilities of the day. It is intimate, inward, illuminated by the moon and stars—beacons of connection to all who see them. Night holds dreams, and in dreams, deeper things arise. Carl Jung’s archetypes were a system of linking subconscious apparitions to symbols and of understanding how those symbols—like myths, like iconography, like language—become bridges between realms, keys to deeper understanding.
Liisa Nelson, Nintendo Super Mario Apse, 2024, 16” x 10” x 12” , Stoneware, Photo courtesy of The Clay Studio
When I was nine, growing up in small-town Montana, my sister and I got a Super Nintendo for Christmas. As culturally sheltered rural kids in the early 90s (pre-internet), this was a BIG DEAL. We’d spend hours playing Super Mario Bros., Mario Kart, Tetris, and later Donkey Kong and Legend of Zelda. I didn’t have a conceptual framework for it at the time, but this was a cultural encounter. The imagery, the music, and the worlds were enticing and gratifying. Looking back now, with the benefit of age and education, I can see the layers of global influence: Shinto animism in the eyes on the hills and stars, Egyptian pyramids in the desert levels, and the exoticized jungle aesthetics of Donkey Kong drawn from colonial-era ideas of the tropics, Latin America, and Africa. I didn’t think about what any of it meant at the time. I was simply wrapped up in the fantasy of flying turtles, vines sprouting to the clouds, ghosts in castles, princesses in pink, monkeys with music, and all the exciting perils and treasures. I was part of a culture, along with all the other kids in my social sphere. We shared a vocabulary and a sense of belonging.
A couple of decades later, on the El train from North Philly to Center City, I had an experience I’ll never forget. I was with a group of artist friends, and we had unwittingly walked into a car full of heroin users. One man was actively shooting up. A few others were slumped over in their seats, half-conscious. We kept to our corner of the car. I focused on the sound of the wheels on the rails—metal on metal—the clang-clang of it reminded me of the sound effects in the mine cart level of Donkey Kong, and I said so out loud. At that moment, slumped heads shot up with enthusiasm. I looked into eyes of delight and recognition—smiling, nodding. “Right?!” The barriers between our worlds dropped for an instant, and we were just kids, remembering something we had all known and loved. The moment passed, and the chasm returned. But I have not stopped thinking about the power of that moment.
Games, like myths, create portals, transporting us somewhere else, together. They hold space for longing and belonging, for imagining ‘what if?’. They grant us momentary liberation, just like music, star-gazing, dreams, and fantasies.
Liisa Nelson, Mountains and Water,, 2024, 7” x 18 x 15” , Stoneware, Photo courtesy of The Clay Studio
The iconography of the games reflects the mythology of the pre-digital world: treasures, extra life (lives), flight, invincibility, potions for health and special powers. Boons from another realm grant freedom from the constraints of the ordinary world, like the sword in Zelda Excalibur, the feather that lets you fly in Mario, and Hermes’ winged sandals. There was the daring quest, the obstacles to overcome, enemies to vanquish, secret weapons and powers to be collected: new iterations of the same archetypal stories told for millennia.
For most of history, myths were rooted in the land base. Rivers were sacred, mountains were homes for deities and fairies, and stories were maps of places, reflecting values of ecological and social significance, as well as recording dangers and resources of a given place. Cultures have always been influencing each other, whether neighboring regions or far-flung lands that are connected through complex trade networks. Chinese porcelain, for example, was once exported to a European market, and the back and forth of exchange of goods between continents had a profound influence on the identities, craft technologies, and aesthetic values of those places.
In the digital age, these kinds of global cultural encounters, along with market forces, have been accelerated to the speed of a click, and as a result, there is a high-speed intermingling of cultures, and the stories are no longer grounded in place. Yet they may still function as wayfinders, connecting us to diverse archetypal identities in a relational sphere of global interaction, and expanding our views on what stories can be. More importantly, these encounters deepen our understanding of ourselves, our world, and each other.
I’ve been thinking about symbols of transcendence. The Odyssey is a story I often return to. In it, Athena borrows Hermes’ sandals to fly across the sea and aid Odysseus on his homeward quest. “Now Here You Go Again, You Say You Want Your Freedom” (Fleetwood Mac) began by taking a step onto a slab of clay, shaping it around my foot into a sole, a sandal, and piecing together wings out of soft pinches of clay. The piece is many things: a mark of my body, a wish, a claim of freedom, a nod to myth, and a critical reflection on branding—three stripes, wings on a shoe. The promises companies make invariably fall short of fulfilling our underlying longings.
Liisa Nelson, The Forest for the Trees, 2024, 16” x 12” x 15”, Stoneware, Photo courtesy of The Clay Studio
“My Certainty is Wild, Weaving. For You I Am a Child, Believing” (Big Thief) is a piece that resonates with this too. The reference was a toy plastic unicorn I saw in a checkout kiosk at my local farm supply store. In its package world, this mythical creature was enshrined in a cardboard landscape of ethereal forests and shining waters. But what is the real cost of a product like this? A tree has been cut down to create the box, the plastic molded from petroleum that degrades real land and compromises water purity. It is a symbol of values that had to be undermined in order for it to be made. The artwork is a reminder not to trade the map for the territory, the false for the true, the key for the place where the doorway leads.
I’ve been asking myself: to what degree have I traded in the dreams of my childhood for the limited scope of convenience and material gratification in my adult life? And what about our nation, our world? What has the American Dream become in an age of extreme consumerism, of environmental collapse, of corporate dreams bought with the currency of the real, living world? Heaven is not a place beyond a paywall but here beneath our feet— standing on a mountain, looking down at a jewel-toned lake, or laying in a field of sweetgrass and looking up at sweeping clouds. Icons are signifiers, language (not replacements) for the vastness and beauty of what is already here. We must remember the difference between a backdrop screen of icons and the real and actual firmament that connects us to the great beyond.
So, how do we return to authentic dreams, to what emerges from the deepest parts of our being?
Affair with the Moon, a song by Lidia Solomon, became a refrain in the studio throughout the making of this work. This song felt like an echo of themes central to the work— longing, the way the night sky contains dimensions beyond the tangible and the capability love has to command our dreams.
Sun came to me said
I heard you’re having an affair with the moon
Don’t you dare try to deny it
I’ve already confronted her too.
Just answer me this oh
Why would you trade the day for night
I give you my rays and baby blue skies oh
I shot up and said
Please hold back your pouring rain
There’s something that you ought to hear me say
Oh, look now
I ain’t got nothing against the day
It’s just the night always takes my breath away
Sun please don’t be mad at me
Moon has the stars you see
And even on the coldest nights
I look up, I feel warm inside
That’s what the stars they do to me
Reminds me that life is mine to seize
Life is just a dream.”
I’ve been drawn to the night in this season of my life especially—the way it makes space for reflection, for emergent dreams, for grieving and celebrating life behind a veil of privacy and anonymity, for falling in love again and again with mystery and silence. The stars feel like a connection to realms beyond but are tied to the earth, guardians, and conduits for the subtle threads that stretch across all of time, space, and culture, deep into the past and far into the future.
Making this work, I am holding many layers of experience at once, feeling small yet significant in the presence of the vastness of the world and its changes, navigating the nature of reality and my/our place in a world shifting between physical to ethereal interactions. Most of the works are titled with lyrics from the songs that infused them with atmosphere. The playlist has become as much a material as the clay, the glaze, and the imagery. It does not encompass my taste in music but rather a certain night mood, one of layered emotions suspended by specific energies and themes that I have tried to conjure but perhaps fallen short of here.
About Liisa Nelson
Liisa Nelson was born in Montana. Raised on mountain mists, untamed forests and pristine prairies, she is a seeker of quietude and natural places, while nurturing a deep love for human and nonhuman beings, culture, languages, science, phenomenology, reading, music, art, and all forms of learning. Nelson is currently a Visiting Assistant Professor of Ceramics at the New York State College of Ceramics at Alfred University, teaching full-time while pursuing her studio practice and research. She has been an Artist in Residence and a Visiting Artist at numerous institutions including the Jingdezhen Ceramics Institute (Jingdezhen, China), The Central Academy of Fine Arts (Beijing, China), Pottery Northwest (Seattle, WA), The Clay Studio (Philadelphia), and the Paris Gibson Square Museum of Art (Great Falls, MT). Nelson has exhibited her work in solo and group shows across the US and in China. Her work is in several private and museum collections, both nationally and internationally. Visit liisanelson.com and follow @liisa_nelson.
