By Steven Uhles for CANDL Fine Art
Gerry O’Meara and the late Kath Girdler Engler were not confidantes. They were friendly, but not necessarily friends, and their too-few interactions never ventured into the art each was producing.
And yet that conversation has happened. It is happening. It will continue to happen.
Parallel Vessels is an examination of two artists’ work – very different and very much the same. It reveals work, both functional and sculptural, that draws inspiration from natural forms, varied artistic traditions, and the paradox that defines what a vessel is and how it must function.
The result is a thing of rare beauty. It is a collaboration across time, a partnership without formal declaration, and, most significantly, a conversation without words.
The exhibition opens Friday, Dec. 5 at CANDL Fine Art,1128 Broad St.
Kath Girdler Engler was the child of a veteran antique dealer, raised to understand the intangible value of the old, broken, and discarded. Her paper pulp sculptures, with often started a simple human forms, became a grounded support system onto which she was able to layer and lay all manner of ephemera. Barnacles, seashells, sticks, stones, and barely legible text and typography were her transformative agents, building ideas, meanings, and a certain symbiology that varied – and vary still – with each encounter.
A prolific and award-winning sculptor, Engler’s work can be found in both public settings and private collections. Many of her commissioned pieces, such as Cultural Triad on the campus of Augusta University and The Nature of Healing at the Wellstar Children’s Hospital of Georgia, have become artistic icons in the city she called home.
Kathleen Girdler Engler died in 2014.
Gerry O’Meara is a ceramic artist based in Augusta, Georgia. Her wheel-thrown vessels merge functionality with a layered aesthetic approach that draws inspiration from the natural world as well as a variety of artistic movements and moments. It is work defined by a commitment to craftsmanship, technical proficiency, and unstated storytelling.
O’Meara has exhibited nationally and has been juried into the Masur Museum of Art’s Annual Juried Competitions, Artfields, the Lagrange Southeast Regional, SIP: A Ceramic Cup Show, and multiple Augusta University Student Shows. Her site-specific commissions can be found in various private collections.
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