Maria Porges, MFA’79, made ceramic sculptures in graduate school. But when the artist and writer moved to the San Francisco Bay Area after graduation, with ambitions to be a fine artist, she became convinced that as a woman, if she worked in clay, she would be “classed as a craft artist.” So she pursued assemblage, the style she has become known for: three-dimensional compositions that include found objects or wax shapes, often incorporating text.

A professor at California College of the Arts, Porges has recently returned to ceramic sculpture. Her interest in it was rekindled in 2020 while she was teaching a course on the history of ceramics going back 20,000 years. She was especially intrigued by ancient vessels from Central and South America, and after the class ended, she made a series of drawings inspired by them. She then decided to make clay pieces based on the drawings, feeling that “there are some of them I want to recover and bring back into the world as a living shape.” In the work that came out of this, her Mashups drawings and sculptures (2021–present) and her Imaginary Vessels (2023–24), she shapes the clay by hand or uses press molds repurposed from previous projects. She leaves the vessels unglazed, rejecting a finish she views as utilitarian.

Porges wasn’t sure at first how to build on her renewed interest in ceramic art. She eventually looked to a group of figurative artists who had been active in Chicago in the decade before her time at the University—the Chicago Imagists, known for their stylized, colorful depictions of the human body. Christina Ramberg’s paintings in particular suggested a new direction for Porges. She drew inspiration from Ramberg’s depictions of bound female forms for the series Con/Re/Straint (2024–25), objects that blend the shapes of Imaginary Vessels and earlier works with nods to the female body. Hair, a recurring texture throughout Porges’s work, appears in these pieces as well, a source of power to be held back or set free.