This project was born from a dialogue with Sharon Lockhart and our invitation to have her spend
time in Mallorca and create an exhibition here. When proposing this collaboration between her and L21 Gallery, it quickly became clear that she wanted to use this opportunity to start work on a new project, departing from the larger complexes of work that comprise much of her practice. But isn’t this desire for something new always the case with artists? Wouldn’t they rather discover and embark on paths uncharted than repeat themselves? This might seem like a common sentiment, but it is not. The attitude and voracious curiosity that drive new endeavors stem from the need to do and, above all, to investigate and collaborate within a diversity of contexts.

We started this project by closely considering its site: Mallorca. Even before identifying and developing its subject, it became clear that the exhibition’s work would be produced here, both conceptually and in practice. Lockhart’s initial interest laid in researching the island’s textile and ceramic traditions—both delicate, labor-intensive, often sacrifice-demanding trades. Above all, they are slow trades, ones that ask vast swaths of time of their practitioners to be truly mastered. While the net to be cast seemed wide, there are in fact fewer and fewer active in these fields. These pursuits are experimental ones, scientific in nature: You know where you start, but not where you will end up.

In retrospect, Lockhart’s focus on these artisanal techniques made perfect sense. She had recently finished her latest film (EVENTIDE, 2022) and, although there are few languages as collaborative as cinema, textiles and ceramics represented a warmer world—an analog one, less reliant on technological intervention. Though this is by no means to say that they are less technical: The knowledge needed to create textiles and ceramics is deeply complex and impossible to impart rapidly. They are crafts that carry with them an irreducible uniqueness, irreplicable and irreplaceable by nature.

In these slow trades, the vast number of variables involved means that one can venture a guess at an outcome, but never to absolute certainty. Hence, collaborations between an artist who relies on both structure and chance, and another with extensive generational, technical knowledge, can produce incredible results. This was the case for Joan Miró and Josep Llorens Artigas in ceramics, and with Josep Royo in textiles. Miró understood the value of the knowledge held by Artigas and Royo as he turned to them to assist in executing his projects, ideas and dreams, crediting them equally in what they created. Miró knew the what, but needed the how. This is the magic of collaboration: the natural exchange that shapes the creative process, fostering an infinite conversation.

Lockhart’s exhibition at L21 Gallery presents the artist’s encounter with tradition and knowledge discovered during her time in Mallorca, and the collaborations that have emerged from those discoveries—encounters that have sparked dialogues, desires, conversations and explorations, many of which are still ongoing. Collaboration is not a new method for Lockhart, but rather a core tenet of the artist’s extensive body of work.

After many hours spent at the Fundació Miró Mallorca, we found ourselves in the engraving studio where, while speaking about Miró, Artigas, collaboration and ceramics, we came across a collection of small tiles. They all had nearly the same shape, but each was glazed in a different color. They were the results of a series of tests that Majorcan ceramist Joan Pere Català Roig (whose personal studio we had by chance also visited with Lockhart) had conducted years before. The aim of these tests was to demonstrate how glazes react to the most subtle of modifications to its most basic, elemental ingredients once fired. The formulas used came from Josep Llorens Artigas’ manual Formulario y Prácticas de Cerámica (Methods and Practices of Ceramics), first published in 1961. Artigas was a ceramicist and collaborator, and co-author of nearly all of Joan Miró’s ceramic works. That these tests took place at the Miró Foundation highlighted this fact, speaking to the enduring strength of the pair’s work together.

The hundreds of color samples, each unique and nearly impossible to replicate, become a sequence in Lockhart’s new work, entitled 213 Glazes: Josep Llorens Artigas, Joan Miró and Joan Pere Català Roig, Fundació Pilar i Joan Miró a Mallorca. Its title is replete with ebbs and flows of time, generations and practices, the connections between which are concisely, albeit not exhaustively, enumerated. Here, Lockhart encapsulates a conversation that comes together by way of 213 small fragments measuring no more than five centimeters tall. They form a continuous row of glaze samples spanning the color spectrum in a single image—a tracking shot, the ordered rhythm of which contains echoes of her structured, measured films.

This artist’s book presents itself in the galley’s space twice, in each instance unfurled upon plinths to reveal distinct sections of its 11-meter length. Its cover, in highlighting the subjects, participants and fortuitous intersections that, together, have formed a path, a sequence, a chain, complements its accordion format. This too closely parallels its narrative of collaboration, one step at a time, like
a scene shot without cuts and without hierarchy. One that invites us to travel along with its camera through a familiar landscape. Each tile stands in frozen time, inviting focus and giving rise to a richly layered encounter with our present.

Thanks

Julia Raphaella Aguila, Francisco Copado Carralero, Juan David Cortés, Óscar Florit, Esmeralda Gómez Galera, Ada Hennel, Elisabeth Kley, neugerriemschneider, Tim Neuger, Joan Oliver, Aina Pomar, Burkhard Riemschneider, Alex Slade, Paz Vidal, Alejandro Ysasi, Joan Pere Català-Roig.