May 31 - June 1 and June 7 & 8, 2025
The biannual East Bay Open Studios offers regular folks, art freaks, and all curious passers-by to enter into the intimate and often kooky worlds of our local creators. A delight and an opportunity to mine the minds of fellow oddballs, I’m always grateful for the chance to pick brains about process, material manipulation, and the significance, or lack thereof, of design elements or aesthetic choices.
I was unable to hit the season’s opening party at Ciel Creative Space (an “urban acupressure” hub with base memberships—aka access to shared, open, common workspaces, a badge of creative cool, and “priority on the office waitlist” running over two grand a year or a higher level membership with “lots of plant life” for a mere $999 per month) last Thursday. So my weekend studio visits afforded me one-on-one time with some lovely artists in environments they were comfortable in too. A true treat. Sarah Merola’s ceramic baby figures, which I’ve been meaning to check out in person for a minute, were an obvious choice. Their eerie, disconcerting sweetness and delicacy of form were begging for an up-close inspection.
Working in ceramic and bronze, with a good dose of real zippers thrown (carefully placed) in, Merola’s near life-size children lounge and crawl, sleep and stretch, gaze out blankly, cry, softly gape, “o” mouths a-ready for exclamation. Chunky thighs and juicy toe-beans are near-universal in this crowd, but other limbs vary; their presences have ebbed and flowed, returning in force for their emotive, expressive abilities. The restriction of their omittance was too much, the passivity, exposure heightened too greatly.
These children, innocent, cheeky, and unproblematic as can be, all bear the weight of the world nonetheless. Their kewpie-coded faces, bright round eyes, and chubby limbs almost too cute to handle, but this sweetness is tempered strongly by the decay, destruction, and woundedness intrinsic to their bodies, born of crackled glass glaze and jagged metal zipper teeth.
This juxtaposition of their absolute innocence and nakedness with the harshness of reality, life’s beauty and horridness, is her expression of the “involuntary and inevitable, unfair but true” ways of the world. A velvet or faux-fur of a pillow caresses cold hard clay (”Dream a little Dream” 2022), or a gaggle of toddlers peers out, four unblemished and smooth skinned, one crackled belly and blemished cheek alone exposing the darkness of our surroundings. Hand built, like everything in her practice, the children of “One in Five” (2016) reflect their living counterparts, the outlying damaged figurine standing in for her abused siblings, surviving, often silently, surrounded by their unmarked peers.
Even without an artist statement or conversation, a sense of quiet discontent and discomfort pervades. But so does the sweetness. Merola’s meticulous hand, in carving tenderness into features or in formulating layer upon layer of homemade glaze to achieve just the right shades of sickly undertones to mimic their vintage doll inspirations, lends care. They are tender but gaping, delicate and off-putting, adorable and asking for a good strong smooshing, grotesque and sad, confused, in pain, all helpless.
“A wide and unjust range of experience seems to be the only constant in the human condition,” Merola writes, and I’m instantly taken to a collection of stories I read last month, from which my takeaway was the preponderance of unjust thoughts. Our humanness is exemplified by selfish and uncaring feelings and actions amid and among those we love and those we fear. The diseased green or bilious yellow lurking beneath otherwise agelessly smooth skin offers us a visual aid, an obvious and sick depiction of humanity’s ills.
And she’s scaling up. Merola plans to continue to grow her works, in both size and subject matter, with “a kid in the kiln” now—a crouched toddler, set to sit atop a mirror gazing down at herself. Keep your eyes peeled for future showings featuring the new kids, coming soon.
