In the solo exhibition Darkening Ground at Ferrin Contemporary, artist and Alfred professor Linda Sikora  presents a poetic and conceptual look at forms, vessels, and other ceramic gestures using three distinct visual categories—woodgrain, blackware, and redware - which sometimes participate in narrative frameworks such as in the pieces:  ground II; ground III; repose  - works at the core of the Darkening Ground exhibition.  In this, Sikora is thinking about the dark as a generative space and time; a landscape for internal, interpersonal, and cultural constraints and realities to shift and realign.  

“Blackware and Redware depart from the glazed polychrome WoodGrain (a lyrical, rich and luxurious ‘faux’ surface on crock like pottery forms) by using systems reduceable to the most basic material processes. If the glazed work is alchemical, Redware and Blackware are of an opposing bearing: elemental turned forms surfaced informally with basic tools - ‘finished’ only by the heat and atmosphere of the kiln drawing color from the clay– as fire has drawn these same colors forth from earthen clay through all time. This series of darkening ware made over the last few years began as a lament – the labor of fabrication, cathartic - the forms still and grounded and basic, literally and figuratively, with surfaces that are rudimentary, obsessive, laborious but casual - behavioral. The subjects are primary: basin, kettle, jar - wash, drink, hold. As the series unfolded, it conjured the mechanized technique of engine turning Western industrial wares (rosso antico and black basaltes.)  It came to be that Blackware and Redware stood in relation and opposition to these. It is most productive to consider them as differing beside each other in ‘spacious antagonism’. (Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick)  

 Blackware and Redware basins and hut shaped jars with wide girth and full volumes are rooted in place; kettles with handles or smaller forms remain easy to engage or put into service. Service, storage, and display are platforms for culture and behavior I have identified and associated, with all my work, over several years. To serve (engage, offer), to store (hold, remember) and to display (make visible) are gestures that are scalable. These gestures occur in close proximity at individual, private, household levels and, they occur on large scale societal levels - engaging, offering, remembering is the processes of seeing – and at their foundation.  Far from neutral, meaningfully made objects we live with and evolve with, influence how we pay attention to everything; they influence how we reflect ourselves back to ourselves, and ultimately, how we stretch to know a broader world of conditions that are large and abstract - such as time for example: consider a jar where stillness and silence can actively hold for durations longer than a life.” -Sikora, 2023