Amelia Lockwood
Club Mtispiri

October 9 – November 20, 2021

The Valley is pleased to present its first solo exhibition with Los Angeles based artist Amelia Lockwood. This exhibition, titled Club Mtispiri, presents a series of ceramic works made from clay harvested and fired in the mountains of western Georgia in the village of Mtispiri; as well as works created in the artist’s studio in Los Angeles. The two bodies of work jointly reflect the artist’s explorations with gestural language, producing power objects that are reflections of our energetic surroundings, animate and inanimate. 

The works created in Georgia take the form of animals, candelabras, and vessels; a collection useful for play and ritual, existing in an ethereal space between psychic and physical atmospheres. Works from this series were fired in a pit fire, the oldest known method for firing pottery. While kiln firing is more efficient, pit firing allows a more intimate relationship with the material transformation that occurs in the process, as well as the care required to maintain ideal firing temperatures, often involving a collective and around-the-clock monitoring of the pit for the duration of the firing process. This close relationship with the fire gives Lockwood’s sculptures a connection to the land in both their form and function. In the creation of these works, the artist reflects on the ground and what emanates up to us, to plants and animal life, from the earth. Everything is a vessel for what the earth produces, and therefore engaged in a process of collective exchange.

In addition to the pit fired works, Lockwood presents a series created in Los Angeles, a rollicking collection of sculptural and functional works emblazoned with totemic images from the artist's lexicon. Platters and vessels congregate in the niches of the gallery walls, alongside small “labras” (shorthand for candelabras, or any of her works taking the form of candles) and “zubis,” chimeric animal forms with wings, horns, and often breasts. Large vessels, potion bottles, game boards, flaming wheels and towers, and stair stepped platforms occupy the main gallery; alongside mystic chickens, the keepers of knowledge. The overall effect is total immersion into Lockwood’s world, where viewers are asked to read each work like an esoteric text, hunting for resolution through motion. Solving, unsolving, and resolving; harvesting energy and mapping spiritual systems. Recurring themes in her symbolic and visual language come together to dance at Club Mtispiri, and though they are objects with purpose, they are also objects at play.