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                    Slide Presentation, International Wood Fire Conference
               Paula Rice, Professor of Art, Northern Arizona University, Flagstaff

                                                        October, 2006

 I have selected and will present only those pieces that are closest to my primal sources for making art. Finding only those few pieces has clarified my thought.  All my life as an artist, I have had but one gestating idea, which is now quite large, and getting larger. My attempt has been to make it visible.  It has taken many forms. Here are several.

From my mother, who was a painter (and, it is fair to say, a genuine mystic), I learned that information can be transferred telepathically.  I remember one example in particular.  At the age of sixteen, I found myself alone at night, thirty miles from home, in a dangerous situation.  It is possible that I could have been killed.  I did manage to escape, and raced home.  When I arrived, I was astonished to learn that my mother was waiting up for me, knew what had transpired, and was praying for my safety.  How did she know?

This and other instances of extra sensory perception were not uncommon at my home. From these, I learned my first interesting lesson:  We do not end with our skin, and there is a wilderness inside of us.  We are alive with magic.  I became fascinated with the mystery of consciousness, and the miracle body it manifests.  In my art, I have been able to work with nothing but the figure since.

Later, on the way home from a year spent teaching art in East Africa, an important event occurred for me.  On a Pan American flight from Cairo to Rome, over the Mediterranean Sea, our pilot announced to us that we were being accompanied, at exactly our speed, by an unidentified object to the right of the plane. Out we all peered into the blue sky.  There, in broad daylight, high above the clouds, was a metallic looking silver object shaped like a half – sphere, with three beams attached above.  It followed us, in full sight, for about ten minutes. Then, without any fanfare, it drew back.

This event has been reported and investigated, and remains unknown. My life has been changed in ways I do not understand by this event, and ramifications continue.  Each day, I search the sky, not knowing for what. I know now that there is a wilderness outside of ourselves which is at least equal to the mysterious landscape inside. As an artist, this acknowledgement has been revealed throughout my work.  It has become my second interesting lesson.

My third lesson can only be called a life course in the ways of healing. Although art has other purposes, I have learned how art restructures reality so that we can live with loss. Years ago, when I was married to Don Reitz, our five year old niece, Sara, became desperately ill with cancer.  I watched as Don received her little drawings, recreated them on powerful clay tablets, added his own miracle marks, and sent them back to her as prayers. This is art at its most powerful.   This is what it is for.

Later, after she recovered (I was powerless to move while she was sick), I created my Sky Child Series, a group of ceramic wall pieces showing the images of a child dancing with death in many ways.  That is what I had seen first hand.  It was these pieces that finally dissolved the anxiety that remained within me from the experience of living through Sara’s terrible illness.

Later, with other experiences of loss that come inevitably to all of us, I created my Lazarus Series.  These were male figures, seemingly dead and alive simultaneously, wrapped in cloth, coming forth from the absolute dark to the bright light of day to be reborn.  I have discovered, over and over, that my work puts me back in balance.

As an amateur astronomer, I have always been fascinated by the sky at night. I am fortunate enough to live in the city of Flagstaff, whose clear skies and high altitude assisted in the discovery of the planet Pluto in 1930.  Recently, I joined four astronomy clubs here, and have spent many hours looking out of telescopes into the vast, mysterious, and impersonal universe.  I have been studying images from the Hubble telescope and new information from space, and have been struck by a powerful sense of chilling indifference to us as insignificant players in such a realm.  Somehow, in a kind of pilgrimage and ascent to the stars and planets, we are thrown right back into ourselves, where we started, in our minds.

My new work uses these experiences as fuel.  My “Planet Series” is a “solar system” of ceramic figures, each with psychological configuration and textural surfaces referring to landscapes on planetary bodies and other objects in space. I am attentive to new scientific information and imagery from the vast landscape of space, which has been brought home to us so incredibly now.  My pieces are influenced by the frontality and sense of stillness of ancient Egyptian sculpture, a sensibility that seems appropriate to my subject. My new work is a way for me to imagine a reality incomprehensively vast, and bring it down to human size.  It is a way for me to inhabit these planets myself, to make human connection where there seems to be none, in this great wilderness outside of ourselves.  I hope my work does this for others as well.

Of course, my new work is about us on Earth.  Our sense of place, and the size of our imaginations, has had to stretch to include the vast landscape of space for the first time in human history.  My work places us in these new surroundings.