Margaret Boozer is an artist of startling modesty. Her hand with materials is soft and earnest … her techniques respectful, delicate. Her work turns the stuff we walk on – clay and loose dirt, often – into graphic drawings and sculptures for the wall, among other things. Inside Red Dirt Studios, her warehouse-studio-ceramics school in Mt. Rainier, MD, discs dusted with violet soil constitute Red Dirt Poem (detail shown, below). Porcelain laid out in paper-thin pieces will be assembled on translucent standing screens. On a wall she displays a found chunk of red clay with layered, peeling edges – think how sun-baked mud dries in cracked sheets. Boozer says the layers are a record of the rains that fell one summer on that particular wedge of earth.
She always travels with a shovel, and takes material from her own doorstep, building sites, quarries, and mines far and wide. She’s drawn to dirt containing a slew of hues – purples, yellows, reds, and certain browns. On a dig, she slings material into buckets as if it is, well, clay, dirt, and rocks. After she’s developed an attachment to the material, though, she can no longer haul them carelessly – she wraps them in paper for transport.
The beauty of what she does is both strange and obvious – she manipulates material to better exhibit traits it already contains. Clay is allowed to be clay, it’s expected to be clay, she’ll not glaze it blue or shape it to look like a person. She’ll spread it out, soak it wet, and begin a “drawing” by cracking the material strategically as it dries. “I find a lot to respond to,” she says. How damp the mud, clay, or porcelain is when touched will determine how and where the cracks will travel. The pressure of impact, the material’s age and mineral content, and the density of its particles – these things matter, too. At a project’s end, there’s little evidence of effort in her work. To be compared so kindly with the artistry of natural environments? A high compliment, indeed.
