The Shape of Water, an exhibition of ceramic sculpture by artist Stephen Freedman

Volcano Art Center is pleased to present The Shape of Water, an exhibition of ceramic sculpture by artist Stephen Freedman, on view October 3 through November 15 at Volcano Art Center’s gallery in Hawaiʻi Volcanoes National Park. An opening reception will be held Saturday, October 3, from 2 to 4 p.m.

A third-generation ceramicist and sculptor, Freedman’s work is informed by both his surroundings and a family history rooted in science and art. His mother, a ceramicist, introduced him to clay as a child, while his father was an evolutionary biologist who worked in South Africa alongside Louis Leakey and Raymond Dart in the study of human origins.

Freedman’s artistic influences range from Sung Dynasty stoneware and the sculpture of Auguste Rodin to Darwinian principles of evolution. In The Shape of Water, these diverse influences converge in a body of work that considers how natural forces leave their imprint on form.

“There is a place just a mile from this gallery, where for centuries tall ohia trees grew. When Kilauea erupted, deep lava inundated the forest. Trees were incinerated, their sap-filled bodies cooling columns of the molten flow as they burnt. When the flow subsided, towers of hollow lava remained, echoes of a vanished forest in a barren field.

Lao Tzu commented that liquid is shapeless, taking the form of its container. Frozen in the lava fields of Kilauea, the expressed molten core of our planet takes the shape of once verdant nature. Invisible trunks and branches reach up in negative space, entombed in time, marked only by their absence.

The vessels in this series are water containers. Hollowed by an absent hand, hardened in fire, and frozen in glass, the empty spaces within and without take the shape of events that happened in another time and place.”

Through these vessels, Freedman invites viewers to consider the spaces between presence and absence, the temporary and the enduring, and the ways that water, fire, earth, and life continually shape one another.