The Griffon News

Imagine looking at a piece of art that defies expectations. Imagine a beautiful, unorthodox combination of colors, textures, and emotions all blending to form a ceramic mask. The artwork of John Gilgun, retired professor at Missouri Western, is just that. Now on display by the Potter Hall ceramics studio, Gilgun’s work in creating ceramic sculptures and masks blends various finishes together with Dadaist themes in order to create art that progresses boundaries.

First arriving at Western in 1972, Gilgun credits the foundation of his found style from Neil Sandstad, a teacher at the time. Using found objects involves taking items that had an altogether different purpose, and combining them together to create an artistic piece. These objects can be anything from utilitarian products to items found in nature. The Dada artistic movement used found objects heavily in advancing the definition of art. Gilgun uses them in his own.

“There are many interesting tools hanging on a peg board in the ceramic studio and I’d use them to make impressions in the clay body, sometimes taking a tool from the board with my eyes closed, so that my choice was by chance,” Gilgun said.

Not that Dadaism is the only source of inspiration for Gilgun. Combining their philosophy with the styling of ceramic artist Peter Voulkas has proved to be instrumental.
“Seeing what he did was liberating for me. He was deliberately creating something which had never been created before. He was saying to the world that he was not interested in making utilitarian dinnerware, cups, saucers, bowls, teapots. His work freed me to do my masks. When I started I made bowls and cups like every other student. But they all seemed the same to me and they bored me. Then I discovered masks. No one makes anything like the masks I make and no one can put soup or tea or carrots in them. Voulkas allowed me to do this,” Gilgun said.

With those two cornerstones, Gilgun has gone on to create ceramic masks that express a pallet of emotions. With every piece being inspired by either an experience, a story, or a feeling, his work stands as being completely unique. It’s an engaging experience to look at. Many of the pieces seem to be formed by the intangible, a creative nature that eschews that boundaries of most art. Even the techniques used in constructing the ceramic masks have a freedom: Gilgun uses wood firing, salt firing, raku, and his own painting techniques.

The actual construction of the masks has an individual independence as well:

“Doing ceramics is a form of meditation. And all Western ceramics is influenced by the East because that’s where the ceramics which influenced Western ceramics came from originally.”

By crafting his art in this form of semi-isolation, Gilgun is able to connect with himself, his art, even nature. This stems back to when he first began working with ceramics.
“When I left to go on sabbatical, ceramics was taught in a farm shed on the edge of campus with corn fields as a background, blue skies and a blossoming pear tree over a picnic table.”

All of these connections have led Gilgun to create masks which seek to express ideas and feelings about the human condition. Instead of the pragmatic, Gilgun works for the progressive. Instead of concentrating on a singular vein of thought, Gilgun embraces styles and various cultural ideas. All of this lets a viewer see how unique Gilgun’s display really is.