Karl Yost
For several years, I have been using pottery to explore the landscape of the western United States. The work is concerned with the shapes and textures of the geography and with the jewelry-like intimacy of the small found objects that so many of us are drawn to while exploring woodlands, deserts, mountains and sea shores: the intriguing bit of bone, the soft green colored rock, or the oddly twisted piece wood. These things though small in size have there own sense of monumentality and presence.
Karl Yost’s pottery reflects his travels and experiences in the western part of the United States. With colors and textures inspired by driftwood, wasp’s nests and eroded shells, Yost’s art draws ecological, meteorological and geological parallels, coaxing viewers to more deeply observe and appreciate nature.
Yost, a collector of “found objects” explains their relationship to his work, “One day, a friend looked around at all the rocks and bones I had cluttering up my house and said, “you shouldn’t be collecting these things, you should be working within the metaphor they create.”
For Yost, the metaphor is oppositional: the objects themselves are transient, but nature isn’t. “My art draws ecological parallels, since we’re destroying things faster than they can be created. I’m asking people to take a moment and really look at that soft green color in that stone.”
Yost’s pots aren’t simply thrown; they are sculpted, scored, stretched, angled, flattened, fractured, bisque-fired and glazed in a controlled yet comfortable process of careful removal and deliberate inclusion. Yost uses standard pottery tools for his incising, but invents his own tools for texturing. “This isn’t like throwing. The process of removing clay is more sculptural.”