The Red & White

If I were to use one sentence to describe this exhibition, it would be how I feel more like the artwork than the works themselves. All those faces on the wall, green, red, big, small, stare straight through my body to my soul.

Jillian Barber’s masks and sculptural animals fill the room with a steady, grounded presence. She does not romanticize the process. “I never know what they’re going to turn out like,” she tells me. “I start with a body, legs, a shape, something intuitive, and then I let them grow. All the energy goes into the head. That’s where life happens.”

Barber’s path to this gallery begins in Staffordshire, England, where she was born during World War II, and then in Westerly, Rhode Island, where she grew up as the “class artist” year after year. She studied ceramics at RISD when very few students chose the medium. “There were only eight of us in ceramics in my graduating class,” she recalls. After school, the progress was slow and practical. She identified the wholesale shows that mattered, New York and New Jersey, and built a routine: take orders for six months, fill them, then repeat. “There was a time the UPS man was at my door every day,” she says. The work ranged from hanging planters, often rimmed with lace impressions and populated by dragons, fish, or birds, to four-legged animals that began as horses and drifted toward centaurs, elephants, and other hybrids. When the forms started to topple, she made them recline. “That’s how they wanted to be,” she says, not as a slogan, but as a factual note about weight, balance, and clay.

Eventually, she left the wholesale circuit, moved into galleries and juried shows, and cut back on travel. Before that, she had done a dozen retail fairs a year, packing tubs, renting vans, and even driving into armories to unload. Today, she keeps it local, Wickford Art Festival every July (three decades running) and a handful of nearby events. The shift is less about reinvention than about pacing: the work continues, the logistics change.

Faces are the constant. As a child, she drew self-portraits; as an adult, she cast friends, poets, and strangers, turning plaster molds into clay masks. One early casting, a woman who worked above a Newport gallery, became a recurring presence. “People always wanted her face,” Barber says. She still uses the mold decades later, building new worlds around it: floral headdresses, dragon motifs, broken pottery mosaics. A single face remains stable while everything around it changes.

Her method for masks is direct. After casting, she presses clay into the mold, lets it firm, then removes and repairs the impression, altering noses, opening eyes, adjusting lips. Larger masks get a lace “headdress” framing the face. Many begin with a simple move she repeats without explanation: a rope-like ring under the chin. From there, the additions vary: pea pods, leaves, birds, or an encircling dragon. Color comes late and by feel. She keeps dozens of glaze jars on hand and chooses in the moment. Some pieces end up saturated; others are white on white, closer to bone than paint.

The animals, dragons, sea creatures, and composite beings are built in parts, heavy and hollow. The weight dictates engineering: where to lift, how to join the head last, and when to ask a friend to help load the kiln. Nothing about that description is glamorous, but it is the kind of detail you can see in the finished objects: seams resolved, mass supported, a head that looks truly set on a body.

Barber resists broad claims about the art world. She doesn’t rank eras or trends and avoids debates about evolution versus decline. Standards, she says, are subjective. A recent juried show in Mystic made the point for her: the painting she thought would win first prize received an honorable mention; she was simply glad to be included. The opinion that matters most is the one that keeps you working tomorrow.

On copying, she is clear. An eighth-grade teacher once told her, “You’ll never become an artist if you copy.” She took the advice to heart. Influence is fair; she borrowed lace impressions from a peer years ago and made them her own, but a one-to-one lift is not. The difference, in her telling, is obvious once you’re at the table making actual decisions in clay and glaze.

Barber also experiments beyond clay. She assembles reliquary-like boxes with found objects, broken ceramics, and color fields, a parallel practice guided by the same rule as her masks: internal logic first, plan second. She collects kimonos and other textiles, not to signal a theme but because their patterns and histories feed surface and structure. She shrugs off explanations that reach too far. The studio shows what she means.

Some of her best stories come from the difficulties of face casting: gallery owners who panicked mid mold, a young boy so frightened by the process that his finished mask captured fear itself. She solved the problem by adding a dragon that reaches toward the eye, converting panic into narrative. The piece stayed with the family. It is hard to think of a better example of what these works do when they leave the studio: they carry the residue of an encounter and let viewers finish the meaning.

This exhibition shows the results of that steady approach. Stand in front of them and you’ll notice the small decisions: where texture stops, how a lace edge turns a corner, the way a rope line under a jaw sets the face. The animals nearby extend the same discipline into motion and mass.

Walking out, the tranquil night felt noisy. In a season full of voice, Hunters Gallery has given us a room where looking is the point, and the work looks back.