Art Matters Magazine, Fall/Winter 1998

Color and Clay

Clay artist Connie Bracci-McIndoe infuses her work with her own lively spirit.

She’s short and vivacious, with curly red hair and a hoyendenish laugh.  She loves the color orange, wears earth tones and funky earrings, and cooks from “Gourmet” magazines.  She’s authoritative about her specialty and highly-regarded in her field.  Connie Bracci-McIndoe, of Hopewell, NJ, is a clay artist.

A converted wood-storage and workshop building, the home she shares with her artist-husband, Ken, and four cats may be the best reflection of McIndoe’s values, as well as her work.  The first clue that its residents enrich and savor their setting: the two-story structure is surrounded by luxurious flowers and foliage.  Complete with a stream on one side, the property includes – besides a double-chambered catenary-arch brick kiln, a raku kiln, and pit firing equipment – a stand of bamboo and some 150 orchids varieties that summer among the trees and bushes. 

Reflecting the couple’s shared love of color, floors of the high-ceilinged house are thoroughly covered with rich-hued oriental carpets.  (Considering that the living room alone is about 35 feet by 35feet, that’s a few rugs.)  Above the rug level, throughout the house, tables and surfaces and walls are filled with art of all sorts.  With living quarters upstairs, the ground floor includes studio space and what the artist jokingly calls “the salon,” serving as a showroom for both McIndoes’ work and featuring a huge yellow ceramic stove the bought, unexpectedly, at a New York auction and transported home by taxi, in pieces.

The very furniture, including McIndoe’s tables and lamp bases, is part of the art, and her sculptural objects are all over.  Walls are hung with pieces by both McIndoes and those whose work they admire.  Raku and low-fire tiles – she made them, he laid them – cover the entry hall and a window “bump-out” that houses an assortment of unusual plants.

Wildly varies art works – masks, ceramics, and assemblages – virtually tumble off shelves and out of chests and through staircase openings.  Like its inhabitants, the place demands appreciation time.  An artist-friend calls the McIndoes “the truest artists I know.”

“Their lives revolve around their art,” he says, noting that they don’t even have a TV.  “(Mcindoe says they do now; it’s in a closet.)  They live by Gourmet, “the friend says.  (Known for her cooking, as well as its artful presentation, Connie McIndoe has every issue of the magazine since 1973).

The experience that shapes this artist and, in turn, her milieu, occurred on a trip to Mexico during her college years.  She saw clay pots, said, in effect, “This is wonderful,” and started then, proceeded t learn all she could about clay art.  Her undergraduate major and master’s degrees in English notwithstanding, she had found her field, and she began slay studies once she realized that was where she wanted to go.  Her training have included Greenwich House Pottery in New York City, Penland School of Crafts in North Carolina and ceramics studies in Turin, Italy.  She also apprenticed to Hajime Fujimoto, master potter in Fukuyama, Japan.

Born in New York City, McIndoe taught art at Queensborough Community College for 25 years, commuting a few times a week from her home-studio in Hopewell.  For 10 months a year, she still teaches three weekly classes in clay at her own studio, but come July and August, she’s on “vacation” – with leisure time to do her won work and travel.

As an artist, McIndoe has both serious and light sides, and she doesn’t always confine herself to clay as a medium.  She does, though, the work she turns out is both varied and awesome.  The range includes: 

A hand-built raku dragon, fired in three parts, then joined, now lying on top of a chest – maybe guarding the doorway to the McIndoe kitchen, itself another story of art and food prowess.

Large sculptural pieces – often the result of self-assigned project.  For instance, the organically shaped, nearly two-dimensional works, earth-toned and very textual, whose clay bodies are “groggy,” for strength, and include vermiculite as well.  Devising ways to realize what she’s after tests the artist’s patience and ingenuity.  She talks about carving Styrofoam into a desired shape, covering it with clay, and when that gets “leather hard,” dissolving the Styrofoam out to create a hollow finished piece.  Fired at Cone 5 in her kiln, these are “Almost stoneware,” McIndoes says.  Some are thigh-high and have irregular holes and handles.

She also makes pit-fired sculptural pieces resembling wrinkled, smoky-hued pumpkins, each with an opening at the stem position.  These are comparatively porous – not intended to be functional objects:  “They also serve who only sit”… and look fraught with meaning! 

The clay furniture and home accessories that she makes to suit herself, including pit fired or raku bases and sculptural table bases made of clay.  McIndoe doesn't really market these pieces, explaining, "My things are unconventional, and people like colors."

That’s the serious side, which, along with the distinctive bowls, dishes, platters and vases, represents Connie McIndoe’s oeuvre.  Or does it?

“Sometimes I feel I just have to get away from clay,” McIndoe says.  For a change of medium – and message – she turns to jewelry making, favoring hanging earrings usually made of mixed-media beads.  That her jewelry is also colorful comes as no surprise.  (Even her seemingly neutral-toned sculptures take on vividness as she talks about making them: they glow quietly.)  Now and then, she’ll do an oil painting.  Those on view in her home include rocky-coast-of-Maine scene and abstract work, none of them small or self-effacing.

And a couple years ago, in keeping with her (“large and somewhat warped”) sense of humor, she had an exhibition of see-through wire purses she had assembled.  Each purse carried an unpredictable array of contents, from faux bats and birthday cakes to a rubber octopus, and all were displayed on the walls of Art’s Garage, a very non-traditional art gallery in Hopewell, which on work days more closely resembles an auto repair shop.  A grace note: the show was called “I Segreti della Borsa.”

For the opening reception, the artist happily involved another of her specialty areas;  food.  She made the munchies, which shared appreciative exclamations with the purses.  One “Miss Lily Receives Broccoli,: was a takeoff on the countless Annunciation scenes McIndoe has seen during her frequent travels and art study.   About one foot wide by two foot high, including its handle, if shows Miss Lily (a. k. a.  a painted lobster claw) in a reverential position, facing (copper) rays of light and a suspended bunch of (clay) broccoli.

Now, Mcindoe's work can be found at By Hand Fine Craft Gallery in Haddonfield, NJ, Heart of the Home in New Hope, PA, Des Champs Gallery in Lambertville, NJ, The Village Craftsmen in Ocracoke, NC, and Nest in Hopewell, NJ.