VISUAL ESSAY

Over the course of last spring, 130 artists met at Greenwich House Pottery in New York and collaborated to make several hundred ceramic works with the aim of selling them cheap for a good cause at a huge fundraiser/musical theater/party event in December 2018, just before the holidays begin. The project is called International Space Station because there’s room for everyone to contribute to the whole. It began as an invitation to friends and artists to get together and be active in these perilous times.

The International Space Station was initiated by Pam Lins, Halsey Rodman and me as an extension of the Ceramics Club (CC), which we started 12 years ago. The project is loosely based around a futuristic dinner party and bar – a table and a bar. The table is designed after Lina Bo Bardi (1914-1992), an Italian-born Modernist architect and designer who mostly worked in Brazil.

She was an early practitioner of sustainable design, alongside being an activist. In the context of the event, this table acts as both a structure for displaying the objects, and as a stage for my play The Pelvic Floor.

With the table there are also stools designed by Pam Lins.

The project also includes Halsey Rodman’s Moon Bar with ceramics made by CC.

The International Space Station nods to many histories: from the American art-pottery movement in factories in the 1870s to the Boston club of the Saturday Evening Girls; from writers like Ursula K. Le Guin to artists such as Anna Maria Maiolino and

Judy Chicago and her seminal

Dinner Party (1974-79). It creatively re-considers feminist history, building a social space populated by bodies and objects.

The visual essay on the following pages draws inspiration from this experience.