March 3rd, 2021
By Leah Ollman
The origin story of Kathy Butterly’s endlessly inventive sculptural practice—whether she is telling it herself, or it is being written by others—typically begins with her formative influences. As an undergraduate painting student, she was introduced to the huge ceramic figures and athletically immersive process of Viola Frey, an encounter that first revealed to her clay’s expressive capacity. The narrative moves forward from there, through graduate study under the irreverent Robert Arneson and assimilation of the delicious formal deviancies of George Ohr, Ken Price, and Ron Nagle. Further back, though, there’s another old key that I learned of through a podcast interview shortly before seeing Yellow Haze, a ravishing selection of Butterly’s recent work at Shoshana Wayne Gallery: if she weren’t working in clay, the artist briefly thought she might become a designer of shoes, or maybe toys. This tidbit of personal history teases out even more resonance from her intimately-scaled works, dense as they are with allusions to the body. Their sunken mouths now also assume for me the tender, bereft quality of empty shoes whose walls gently collapse around the memory of a held form. If Butterly’s motley beauties spur limitless reads, it’s the result of each of them being, for her, a vehicle for uninhibited, improvisational, rule-averse play
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