What do you think everyday objects tell us about history and ourselves? What might future archaeologists think about our commonplace items? What might they be able to understand about our current moment and our social and cultural backgrounds?

“The Flames Leave a Feathered Mark on the Clay Spider in the Chamber of Ash and Clay” marks the first solo museum presentation for internationally celebrated Mexican artist Mariana Castillo Deball (Germany, b. Mexico 1975) in Arizona. The exhibition features a newly commissioned installation of seven hand-built, pit-fired stoneware ceramics resembling natural and manufactured items –– from spiders and turtles to altars and backpacks. It also features a “Cabeza Olmeca San Lorenzo 1 (rostro lado derecho),” a fiberglass sculpture of half of an Olmec head, by Castillo Deball, which has been acquired as part of the museum’s collection. Taken as a whole, Castillo Deball’s work, bridging science, archaeology and craft, questions how objects shape versions of identities and histories in our contemporary world.

“Mariana Castillo Deball: The Flames Leave a Feathered Mark on the Clay Spider in the Chamber of Ash and Clay” is organized by ASU Art Museum Senior Curator Alana Hernandez and ASU Art Museum Windgate Curatorial Fellow Sade Moore and made possible by generous funding from Windgate Charitable Foundation.

The title of the exhibition comes from the poem by John Ashbery: Self-portrait in a convex Mirror from 1974, in which he takes as a starting point the homogonous painting by the Italian late Renaissance artist Parmigianino from c. 1524. The painting is a Self-portrait of his image in a convex mirror.
Parmigianino used a half spherical wooden surface for the painting, replicating the distortion of the convex mirror on the painted shape.

The whole is instable within

Instability, a globe like ours, resting

On a pedestal of vacuum, a ping-pong ball

Secure on its jet of water.

And just as there are no words for the surface, that is

No words to say what it really is, that it is not

Superficial but a visible core, then there is

No way out of the problem of pathos vs. experience.

Mariana Castillo Deball’s anthropological gaze is focused on work, on matter, on nature, the places of choice for her research are anthropology, archaeology, paleontology, museums and collections of applied arts and those of science, wherever objects can be found, tools that are the result of craft and traditional production processes that incorporate technical knowledge of collective cooperation, objects with which the artist interacts, adopting, adapting, translating and appropriating them to tell a relativized story while reforming the Eurocentrism of History. Mariana Castillo Deball liberates the intangible essence of objects by freeing them both from their use and exchange value for which they were made in their communities of origin, and from the positivist classification of museums or collections in general, redesigning spaces. Castillo Deball well knows that putting or putting things back to their place confirms the social and cultural order established; so, she moves things as far away from their agreed places as possible. Liberating objects by turning them into things is a ritual practice of Castillo Deball’s art to free the thought, to make it breathe and have a more natural relationship with the surrounding world. Mariana Castillo Deball’s work by reasoning and deliberating about things, represents a curious or rather surreal study of material culture, since objects inform our lives, our politics and indications of gender. Castillo Deball’s work with practical reasoning also focuses on waste. Someone said that man is a ravenous being even of future hungers, which have put and continue to seriously endanger the ecological life of our planet Earth. What the past and the present have in common regarding material culture is the disposal of objects once they are no longer used, but unlike the present, in the past there was a scarcity of objects that moreover were organic, and the death of an object coincided with its inability to be repaired once broken: the value was saving not consumption. Today the death of an object often occurs long before its irreparability, and our civilization is based on the consumption of not only having but also being.

Between making and knowing something centers on how stories are performed and retained in museums, and makes visible lesser known practitioners and makers, whose histories have remained too long obscured. The exhibition explores the potential of objects to perform and retain stories by using modes of reproduction, ranging from pottery to weaving and photography, to give shape to and make visible the lives and objects of Zuni lhamana We’wha (1849–1896), her anthropological collaborator Matilda Coxe Stevenson (1849 –1915), Elsie Colsell McDougall (1879–1961) and Makereti (1873–1930). These four researchers and makers were active during the years anthropology was emerging as a discipline and, as the artist states, "there was no difference between making and knowing something".

Between making and knowing something approaches these fascinating subjects in the manner of creative ‘case studies’ or ‘micro histories’, recalling the writing of Carlo Ginzburg who advocated for an alternative view of history by overlooking the dominant figures of power and concentrating on people who have no name, no voice, who have no documentation. As Deball says, "history is always viewed from the point of view of power, so how can you go down into the sources and find the history of people who have no voice?"

A dynamic installation of ceramics and textiles hangs from lengths of rope from the ceiling of Modern Art Oxford’s largest gallery. These ceramic vessels have been hand-made by the artist from red stoneware, referencing the painted designs and pottery techniques common to the Zuni, a Native American Pueblo people native to the Zuni River valley. Deball also studied artefacts originally made by We’wha who had a particular position in Zuni society as a berdache or ‘two-spirit’, or what Zunis refer to as an lhamana—the third gender or ‘man/ woman’; male-bodied people whoake on the social and ceremonial roles usually performed by women in their culture.