Fireman presents Whatever is left, take it with you, a solo exhibition of new ceramic sculptures by Amber Rane Sibley, her second with the gallery. Both dark and playful, her motley crew communicates human frailty, interdependence, and ambiguity. Her materials, clay and glass molded through a masterful array of techniques, reify this notion of formation and flux, constantly in a state of both becoming and unraveling. Emotional traumas are simultaneously literalized in visual metaphor and hidden from view, engendering a complex internal world between and amongst the sculptures.

Sibley’s figures, primarily female, sometimes with child, often swinging between fecundity and barrenness, open questions of empathy, compassion, and emotional agency. Two figures entitled It’s ok and I’m sorry I didn’t tell you earlier anchor the exhibition. Both slightly smaller than human form, the older female figures hunch over in positions of resignation. It’s ok depicts a crone desperately clutching what appear to be her own organs or the disassembled limbs of another figure. I’m sorry I didn’t tell you earlier casts her sister as windblown, forsaken. Her skin is both taut and sagging, her arms handless and flailing. Both are refugees, aliens, shorn of adornment, simultaneously eliciting and scorning an empathic response.

Constant play with the material potentials of ceramic is a hallmark of Sibley’s oeuvre. In this exhibition she has integrated blown and sculpted hot glass into her repertoire. Scorched (D)earth depicts a limbless feminine figure corseted in a lava-like anthracite glaze with a glowing halo of red tinged glass, miming a fiery head wound. Similarly, Anchor to the Chelicarae, a supine figure, surrounded by crabs either parasitic or protective, bears abstracted molten glass veiling her face. The transparency of glass abuts the opacity of clay, both obfuscating and clarifying paths to emotional understanding. Sibley’s use of clay stems from its ability to literalize ideas of transformation, from mythic moldable creation to artful fragility to destruction.

Amber Rane Sibley (b. 1988, lives and works in NY) recently received her MFA from Tulane University. Her work has appeared in The New York times, Ceramics now, hyperallergic, and other publications