Warren Mather - Artists - Lucy Lacoste Gallery

Lucy Lacoste Gallery is pleased to present All Around, a solo exhibition of monoprints on clay by Boston-based ceramic artist Warren Mather from September 5 — October 10, 2026 in Concord MA. In his second solo exhibition with the gallery, Mather invites us to see the world from more than a single point of view — to experience what he calls an “all around, all at once” perspective. Beginning with photographs that become stories in his mind, Mather translates those stories into images on clay through photography, color, shape, and innovative ceramic techniques.

For more than 55 years, Mather has explored the possibilities of photographic and drawn imagery on clay, developing the technical means to translate photographs, video, and computer-generated images into ceramic surfaces. In All Around, he brings together photography, color, and shape to create works that ask us to see the world — and one another — from more than a single point of view. Mather often begins with a photograph of an ordinary activity or landscape. The image becomes a story in his mind, which he then translates onto clay through ceramic screen printing, color, and other innovative techniques. “Currently I cannot get enough of the conjunction of color and shape,” he says.

The circular panoramas in All Around offer a simultaneous perspective, as though the viewer were standing at the center of a space and able to see in every direction at once. In Welcome House Maui, and throughout the panoramic works, Mather seeks to convey a sense of the totality of presence in a space — an "all around, all at once” view that is impossible from a single fixed position, or even by simply turning in a circle. As an anthropologist, Mather is particularly interested in what this expanded perspective might mean beyond the physical act of seeing: “I especially want the viewer, everyone, to behold their fellow humans with equanimity, equality. All around, all at once.”

Other works in the exhibition depict bicyclists riding alongside spindly New England trees and tennis players facing an amorphous figure reminiscent of thermal imaging. Beginning with a photograph of an activity such as cycling or tennis, Mather translates what he sees — and what he imagines or perceives to be in the mind of his subject — into clay. Conant Rider was the first photograph Mather made of bicycle riders on the road where he lives. “My front door, so to speak. The bike whizzed by me. I turned and shot. Then later I saw the road was outlined as a clean rectangle and I felt I saw the mind of the rider.” The rider’s emotional destination, climbing the hill, is suggested by the “thought bubble” above.

Mather made Training Blue at the bottom of the same hill. “I felt the curve of the hill suggested to me the repetition of riding. The work, effort, duration of riding to build endurance. I doubled the image to suggest circling around the hill of trees, and the blue shape was the reservoir of energy being accumulated by all the pedaling.”

Clay offers a hard copy of the artist’s vision.

Artist Statement

I am an innovator in the clay world, originator of soda spray firing, a pollution free alternative to salt firing. Now a pioneer of combining ceramics with photography, digital processing and screen printing.

“It’s a pot” says Schultz the printmaker colleague. Indeed, as if the viewer is centered within the work of “Welcome House Maui,” an indigenous Hawaiian thatch roof ceremonial hall. Nature is all around me as it is on the rock pebble beach of an ocean inlet in Maine “Boot Cove,” and balancing with a camera on the slippery, sliding stones of a rushing stream in Wyoming “Stepping Stones.” Or below the bushy bank of a mountain brook “Brush Creek Black.” “Gunnison Adobes” is an all-around, all at once panorama of the caliche hills of clay and mud in the Western slope of Colorado.

The idea of a 360 degree circular panorama began during the outset of virtual reality. I wanted to use the single video stills and combine them into a signature all-encompassing image of a particular space. Not just a view, but the totality of the visual space.

As if I were standing on a revolving potter’s wheel taking a series of single photos, The method begins by merging the photos into a horizontal strip. With digital processing the ends of the strip are made to meet in a radial perspective. Next the digital image is transferred onto a silk-screen, printed with ceramic underglaze onto plaster and hand colored. Liquid clay is poured on, dried and removed as a thin clay sheet to be trimmed, shaped, fired and glazed.

Early in my 55-year career in clay, I made ceramic trompe l’oeil books. Books as vessels of knowledge. These books had weathered, been forgotten, molded. No longer read for their history and wisdom. A teacher once said to me “you need to open the books, tell the stories within them.”

Today I make stories from photographs that I take. I treat a photo like a piece of clay. Not to be bound by rectangular format. I expand, cut, reshape. When I take photographs, I see stories that I make into images on clay. I add color, shapes, textures, all the properties and potential of the plastic medium in conjunction with my imagination. Where I live there are more bicycles than cars. I photograph the riders. I attempt to share their joy of riding, effort, destination, training and decision making. Funny how the mind works. In the piece, “Climbing,” The trees looked like a road to me. The actual road suggested climbing. I doubled the rider to balance the composition. I am active with sports and recreation. Tennis is half physical and half mental. The color across the net (“Tennis 2”) is the mental preparation before the shot.

Resume/CV