ROSETTE GAULT at Marianne Partlow Gallery (Olympia): Often as thin as handmade paper,these earthenware tableaux seem anything but delicate. Acutely visual, each subtly colored and textured ceramic wall-slab or table-piece reads elegantly slow, as episodes in a kind of pilgrimage. Gault's Emotion is the daylight yellow interior surface of a vessel; its smooth glaze ridges gently at the bowl's bottom, transforming it into a turquoise whirlpool. Gault loosens archetypal references, turning them from static symbolism into signposts, routing a journey.
The wall-piece Sword of Destiny lifts the eye carefully upward (like climbing a rope ladder), from a bowl of honeyed grain, to sword, to a broken, helmeted heroic bust, to a snake. While eloquently separate, each item aspires to a cinematic dissolve,transforming into the next as manifestation of a growing awareness.
With Gault, three simple ridged lines can suggest the trapping corner of a room, or the angle of a wall as it opens into a hallway, providing outlet.
In Exit, stairsteps arc gently through an aquatic-blue surf-textured substance toward a vanishing point on a tilted horizon, turbulence radiating from the corners of each step. Above, the blue is ethereal and its glaze as smooth as a fine liqueur. Rarely, in myexperience, have visual metaphors been employed so discreetly or syntaxed so expertly. Gault takes you by the hand-through a private metamorphosis.
REFLEX, The Northwest's Forum on the Visual Arts VOL. 6, NO.2. MARCH/APRIL 1992
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