Woody De Othello
tomorrow always never is, 2023
Glazed ceramic and walnut wood
Courtesy of the artist and Jessica Silverman, San Francisco
Woody De Othello’s work gives life to the everyday objects around us. Imbuing emotions into his clay renderings of domestic items—from clocks to rotary telephones—Othello personifies what is often dismissed as solely functional or simply decorative. His work can be situated in a lineage of Bay Area ceramists, from the Funk art movement led by Robert Arneson and Viola Frey, to the heaving, expressionistic ceramic vessels of Peter Voulkos.
Othello was born in Miami, Florida, and moved to the Bay Area to attend California College of the Arts for his MFA. Settling in the East Bay, he cites its weather, natural landscape, and community as a source of inspiration.
Photos courtesy of Henrik Kam.
ARTIST BIO
Woody De Othello (b. 1991) is a Miami-born, California-based artist whose subject matter spans household objects, bodily features, and the natural world. Everyday artifacts of the domestic tables, chairs, television remotes, telephone receivers, lamps, air purifiers, et cet era—are anthropomorphized in glazed ceramic, bronze, wood, and glass. Othello’s sense of humor manifests across his work in visual puns and cartoonish figuration. “I choose objects that are already very human,” says Othello. “The objects mimic actions that humans perform; they’re extensions of our own actions. We use phones to speak and to listen, clocks to tell time, vessels to hold things, and our bodies are indicators of all of those.” Othello’s scaled-up representations of these objects often slump over, overcome with gravity, as if exhausted by their own use. This sophisticated gravitational effect is a central formal challenge in his work. Informed by his own Haitian ancestry, Othello takes interest in the supernatural objects of Vodou folklore, nkisi figures, and other animist artifacts that inspire him.
