03.30 — 05.10.25
Devening Projects is pleased to present Stacy Jo Scott’s first solo exhibition at the gallery and first in Chicago. Writ in Water features a ceramics project that utilizes advanced systems to bring ancient production together with digital technology. Writ in Water opens on Sunday, March 30 and continues until May 10, 2025.
In her statement for the exhibition, Stacy Jo says “These works are drawings etched into dry clay or dragged through wet colored slip using a CNC router and stylus. The underlying framework for the drawings emerges from programming scripts based on descriptions of imperial Roman architecture, which were developed with AI-generated code. I alter, layer, overlap, and amend these simplified interpretations to create imagery that seems at once ancient and speculative, evoking a future yet to come.
While digital processes operate in a seemingly timeless realm of perfect repeatability, clay connects to geological time—formed over millennia and bearing the capacity to endure long after our digital systems have become obsolete. “Writ in water”—this phrase, etched into Keats’s grave marker, captures the central tension in these works.
There’s an intentional irony in using AI to interpret symbols of imperial power, while that same technology increasingly functions as a form of concentrated authority in our digital lives. The clay tablets physically manifest this contradiction: they preserve AI’s idealized forms while simultaneously transforming them through material processes beyond algorithmic control. Just as ancient empires left behind ruins despite their claims to eternal authority, these tablets suggest that our contemporary systems of technological power—despite their apparent invincibility and efficiency—remain subject to realities they cannot transcend.
As the bit follows its programmed path, the clay responds with its own material resistance—crumbling and chipping along the precise lines. Though newly created, the etched forms immediately appear weathered, as if excavated from an archaeological site. This visual transformation creates objects that exist in multiple temporal states—brand new yet ancient-looking—embodying both the precision of technological control and the inevitable processes of erosion that await even our most sophisticated systems.”
Stacy Jo Scott is an artist and educator whose practice works to disrupt the presumed binary of the tangible materiality of clay and the intangible machinic code of emergent digital technologies. Her artwork has been exhibited nationally and internationally including at AB Projects, Los Angeles, CA; The Schneider Museum of Art, Ashland, OR; Galleri ROM, Oslo, Norway; Design Fest, Gent, Belgium; CRETA Gallery, Rome, Italy; The Center for Craft Creativity and Design, Asheville, NC; Houston Center for Contemporary Craft, Houston, TX; Museum of Contemporary Craft, Portland, OR; Holding Contemporary, Portland, OR; Pewabic Pottery, Detroit, MI; Paul Kotula Projects, Ferndale, MI; Roots & Culture Contemporary Art Center, Chicago, IL. She has lectured and participated on panels widely including at the Gardiner Museum, Toronto, Canada; the Royal Academy of Ghent, Belgium; Oslo National Academy of the Arts (KHiO), and numerous US-based Universities and institutions. Her writing has been published in numerous publications online and in books and periodicals, and she co-curated the first exhibition on ceramics and digital practices at the Schein-Joseph International Museum of Ceramic Art at Alfred University in Alfred, NY. She received her MFA from Cranbrook Academy of Art, and was previously a Franzen Fellow for Digital Craft at Colorado State University, a Lecturer at The University of California, Berkeley, and she is currently an Associate Professor and Co-Area Head of Ceramics at the University of Oregon.
Publications and Press:
Oregon Arts Watch: Nature and nurture: Stacy Jo Scott at Holding Contemporary
Å virke i verden – eksperimenter med jord, leire og søle, Kunsthåndverk, kunsthandverk.no
SFMOMA Open Space Blog, Handicraft, by Laura Mitchell
Ceramics Now, Object Focus: The Bowl / Museum of Contemporary Craft, Portland
Editions Norma, Crafts: Today’s Anthology for Tomorrow’s Crafts
Overlap and Outliers: Essays on Carnation Contemporary’s Exhibitions 2020 – 2021
Quartz Inversion: Stacy Jo Scott
Ravelin Magazine, Visual Musings on The Golden Dome, by Monica Uszerowicz
Journal of Modern Craft, Guest Blogger, At-Home 3D Printing and the Return of a Craft Utopia
