Bobby Silverman
Untitled (Text Tile), 2013

Material: Glazed Porcelain, Decal

From:
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Thought on Art
The Dial,I, January1841

Beauty must come back to the useful arts, and the distinction between the fine and the useful arts be forgotten…. In nature all is useful, all is beautiful. It is therefore beautiful because it is alive, moving, reproductive; it is therefore useful because it is symmetrical and fair.

Text Tiles Statement:

First trained as a Social Geographer and later as an artist, the enclosed body of work reflects my fascination with the visual representation of information.

The works are based on the rich history of recorded information in ceramics (and the idiosyncratic possibilities of the ceramic medium)l, beginning with the earliest forms of written expression; the Cuneiform clay tablets of 4,000 B.C. The Demon pots of Iranian and Iraqi Jews found in the 6-8th C. AD and the epigraphic pottery of medieval Islam are also unique as the text written on the pieces varied in legibility depending on the potters’ literacy skills, the calligraphers’ desire to embellish, or a determination that the text was only a secondary component that could be recited orally. Something simultaneously narrative and decorative provides a fascinating opportunity for exploration; where semantic interchange is impossible; the beauty of the symbolic language takes precedent.