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Kathy Butterly

The Weight of Looking

Words PLUS MAGAZINE

Photography JAE KIM

Kathy Butterly’s sculptures arrive quietly, only to refuse to let go. They occupy very little physical space, but they exert a pressure that feels disproportionate to their size. Each work pulls the viewer inward, less through display than through density. Color thickens. Edges hold. Surfaces appear worked over so long that they seem alert, almost watchful. What first reads as delicate or contained quickly reveals itself as forceful, even stubborn. These objects hold attention at close range. These objects establish the terms of encounter on their own. They draw attention into a narrowed field, where decisions feel compressed and form appears to think through touch, pressure, and revision. Intensity builds through concentration. Meaning takes shape through insistence, as presence is articulated by holding, gathering, and staying put.

Butterly’s sculptures rest on cubes that reject neutrality. The bases assert themselves as solid, architectural facts. Planes meet. Corners catch light. The eye keeps returning to their edges. Folds crease. Lips thicken. Seams trace the memory of a hand pressing and revising. Glaze bruises the surface, pools, tightens, dries. The works feel close and exposed, charged by a pressure that builds inside their compact scale. Butterly names that pressure directly. “For me, it’s about presence,” she noted. “It’s small, but it really holds the room.”

That presence comes from a self-imposed discipline. “I basically reduced myself to the idea of circle, square,” Butterly explained. The statement lands like a rule she decided not to break. Circle and square operate as a working grammar. The circle enters first, cast in porcelain, smooth and open to change. The square follows as an earthenware cube, cut, scored, slipped, and assembled by hand. Butterly describes the process without embellishment. “It’s like building a building.” The labor resists ease. Clay softens when it wants to slump. Edges require constant correction. That resistance stays visible in the finished work, where fluid form meets constructed base and tension settles into the object as a permanent condition.

Her process begins with a mold she designed, a form she described as “a sphere with a little bit of a very fat lip on the top, and then a tiny little foot on the bottom.” She pours liquid porcelain into plaster, waits for the plaster to drink the water from the clay, then tests the thickness with a finger. “It’s intuitive. I feel how thick it is.” The cast comes out as a generic body. That neutrality is essential. Butterly treats it as a beginning that carries no commitment, only potential. “If I’m going to speak as a painter, what I’m doing is I’m stretching my canvas,” she said.

Then she draws into the clay with the end of a paintbrush. She pushes and pulls. She tears. The language becomes physical and unsentimental, and it is easy to picture the studio table covered in small, unstable forms that look temporarily wrecked. “They look like Frankenstein,” she admitted, “they’re torn, they’re thick, they’re really ugly.” Ugly is a useful stage. It keeps the work from slipping into prettiness too soon. It leaves room for surprise.

Butterly described that first moment of recognition as a kind of test. “I start taking my fingers, and just manipulating, pushing, pulling, ripping the clay, until I see something in it, like, a three-dimensional Rorschach test.” The Rorschach comparison is not a metaphor for psychology in the abstract. It is a description of how the eye searches for a figure inside a mess. The form that appears is not fully formed. It is coaxed into legibility through subtraction. She shaves the surface with blades, knives, ceramic tools, dental tools. Shaving becomes a kind of editing. “What I’m really after is finding the form,” she said, “carving until it starts speaking, and until it has a presence.” It is a method built on listening.

That listening continues after firing, in the long middle stretch where glaze becomes both color and time. Butterly talked about repeated firings as a normal part of the work. Ten. Fifteen. Sometimes more, split across top form and cube, then recombined. The kiln acts as a collaborator that refuses certainty. Glaze makes promises and breaks them. It pools unexpectedly. It dulls where it was meant to shine. It glosses where it was meant to absorb light. Butterly does not frame this as drama. She frames it as attention. She revisits the form repeatedly, adjusting, correcting, and re-firing until it reaches a condition she can accept.

The show’s most decisive move takes place at the base. The cube no longer functions as a background structure. It operates as an active element, shaping how each form is read and felt. Butterly describes these pairings as “sculptural diptychs where they’re both very necessary.” The relationship between top and base carries emotional weight. Color tensions sharpen or soften. Balance tips, steadies, or tightens. The cube takes on a role that alters the temperament of the porcelain above, creating conditions that register as buoyancy, compression, exposure, or containment within each work.

“What I’m really after is finding the form, carving until it starts speaking, and until it has a presence.” — Kathy Butterly

She described the pairing process as a long period of rearrangement. “It’s kind of like musical chairs in the studio for quite a long time,” she said, “because I keep switching the cubes.” You can feel that logic in the gallery. Each work lands in a relationship that looks inevitable, even though it was not planned that way. Butterly trusts sensation. “It’s just the vibe.” The phrase is casual, yet it carries a serious claim. The rightness of the pairing is registered in the body before it is explained by concept.

One of the clearest examples comes through a work she discussed with delight, Syzygy (2025). In the front gallery, she paired a blue top form with a cube that carries a burnt, orange-leaning ground. She did not foresee their collision. The pairing emerged after the cube came out of the kiln and she decided to stop forcing it into a preconceived plan. Butterly described a phrase she began saying to herself before opening the kiln. “I would say to myself, before I open the kiln, I would say, see me now.” It reads like a mantra for perception. It asks for an encounter with the thing as it is today, not as it was imagined weeks ago.

“See me now” also describes what these objects do to the viewer. Their scale encourages a close look, then the glaze pushes the look into duration. Butterly spoke about monochromes that shift with light. “I swear they were breathing, because they change according to the sun.” The claim is vivid, and it fits what a careful viewer experiences in the gallery. A yellow reads warm in one position, then turns acidic when you step a few inches to the side. A satin glaze looks matte from the front, then flashes when you tilt your head. Even a nearly white work carries multiple whites. A dry edge absorbs. A satin face slides light back toward you.

In the back room, Butterly described an all-white work titled Float (2025). She made multiple cubes for it, then returned to white again, not as a blank, but as a field for nuance. She spoke about the cube’s edges as a dry white and the faces as satin. The dry white becomes, in her words, “a very quiet whisper of acknowledgment” to the lines on the form above. She returned to the word whisper more than once, as if volume and restraint were also material choices. Quiet, for her, is engineered. It takes time to reach it.

Time is the show’s ethical engine. Butterly talked about working seven days a week, not through compulsion, but through pleasure. “I’m happiest in the studio,” she said. That happiness does not produce speed. It produces duration. She frames duration as a form of care. “The greatest luxury that we all have, being on this earth, is time,” she said. “The most important thing I can give to the work is my time.” This is not a romantic statement about the artist alone in her studio. It is a refusal of a production model that treats output as proof of relevance. Butterly’s studio is personal in the literal sense. “I don’t have any assistance. I do everything myself. Everything.” The beads, especially, become an emblem of authorship. “I would never want anybody to carve my beads,” she said. “They’re mine.”

The beads deserve attention because they expose a paradox in the work. They look decorative at first glance. They read as ornament, a trim, a border, a necklace, a stitch. In Butterly’s process, they function as architecture, binding the form’s shifts and giving the surface a rhythm that the eye can count. She builds them slowly, painting watered-down clay in a line, over and over, then carving each bead into a circle so it hugs the form “in a very natural way.” The labor is deliberate, even punishing, and she calls it backbreaking. The body pays for the work’s intimacy.

Color, for Butterly, is not applied. It is discovered, tested, and remembered. She spoke about a heightened attention to atmospheric color shaped by travel and observation. In Mumbai, she watched lilac skies form around a blazing sun, its light refracted through layers of polluted air. The hues were vivid and unstable at once, produced by conditions that altered how light moved through space. She does not treat these experiences as commentary that sits outside the work. They function as ways of seeing. Beauty registers through the senses even when it arrives through compromised conditions. Butterly names that tension directly. “I really wanted to make beautiful work,” she said, “but also reflect who I am, what’s going on in the world.” Beauty here does not offer escape. It holds attention in the present.

The show’s title points to energy, to sensation in the nervous system, to the way a small thing can vibrate against the attention you bring to it. Butterly’s sculptures perform that vibration without theatrics. They do it through surfaces that carry the evidence of shaving, smoothing, hesitation, and decision. They do it through glazes that do not land on a single reading. The viewer is invited into that shifting field.

Butterly put it bluntly when she spoke about scale. “You have to go in,” she said. “It’s inside work.” The phrase describes the viewer’s movement through the gallery, and it describes the work’s origin in sustained attention. Inside work takes time. Inside work rewards time. Butterly has built a body of objects that do not ask for a quick verdict. They ask for the kind of looking that she gives them. You come close. You stay. You let the work speak.

Kathy Butterly’s “High Vibration” is on view at James Cohan, 48 Walker Street, New York, from January 9 to February 14, 2025.