Timed to coincide with the 2001 NCECA conference, the exhibition Beyond the Physical: Substance, Space and Light (19 January - 31 March 2001 at The Rowe Arts Gallery, The Storrs Gallery and The Cone Center Gallery of the University of North Carolina at Charlotte) was conceived by curator and University of Florida professor Nan Smith as a catalyst to critical discourse on the installation as a medium in the field of ceramics. Issues regarding scale, the use of mixed media, the contingency of objects, and even the level of craft implicit in installation work are all effectively introduced by the nine examples comprising the exhibition. Perhaps most compelling, however, is the tacit theme of the installation's usefulness in reifying certain temporal aspects of psychology, in particular memory and the emotions associated with the passage of time.

The deferral of meaning implicit in a medium dispersed across space and experienced over time can make the installation an especially convincing metaphor of memory, which is as much about the perpetual gap separating us from certain objects of consciousness as it is about those objects themselves. Conversely, memory serves to associate similar objects and events that are distanced from one another by space or time. This dyadic nature of memory, its play between spatio-temporal separation and continuity, weaves a thematic thread between the otherwise diverse works in Beyond the Physical. The exhibition as a whole conveys an impression of intangibility, even emptiness, despite its composition from hundreds of objects filling three galleries. This sense of absence and the nostalgia that it generates are, ironically, traits that ultimately unite the installations. The overall effect is of a larger, collective memory swelled by the confluence of nine individual streams of consciousness.

The concept of memory extending beyond the traces of an individual's experiences to encompass a larger human history is most overtly reflected in installations by Tori Arpad, Juan Granados and Roberta Griffith. Arpad's "Assumed Histories: Immersion", which incorporates both fired and unfired clay components — as well as media as diverse as wax, computer generated imagery, and a soundtrack including the melancholic cries of a loon — investigates the generally synthetic operation of memory while focusing on the specific subject of "a relationship between mother and daughter through a dream of diving." Immersion in water is a metaphor employed by Arpad to describe the reflexivity of memory, the situation of oneself within the very stream of time that one is attempting to represent.

Granados's "Objects and Memory: Toys, Tools, and Weapons," consisting of a series of low, ceramic pedestals bearing sculptures of articles such as marbles, hammers, and arrowheads, suggests a merging of personal memory, a larger human history, and even a history of the earth. Arranged like rows of crops, the forms are linked to Granados's childhood as a migrant laborer and his discovery, in the tilled soil, of objects left by those who came before. This same kind of connection of personal memory to a more voluminous flow of time instills in Roberta Griffith's "Nezu Reflections" a dual narrative relating her experiences of Tokyo's Nezu Jinja Shrine and an earlier amalgam of history and legend surrounding the shrine itself. Consisting of a series of intensely red, reduced-scale ceramic torii, the installation suggests a vision that is simultaneously vivid in memory and perpetually distant in space and time. A distillation of the traces of a personally enlightening experience, the work is a kind of double memorial, a shrine enshrined.

The construction of memorials as a strategy to counteract time's irreversible flow accounts for the mixture of melancholy and hopeful resolve in the installations of Denise Pelletier and Nan Smith. The title of Pelletier's work, "One Thousand Cranes", calls to mind the poignant story of Sadako Sasaki, a twelve-year-old Hiroshima girl who believed that she could escape an inevitable death from radiation-induced leukemia if she folded 1,000 origami cranes. Pelletier's vessels, based on 19th-century invalid feeders, were partly inspired by a similar tragedy of a more personal nature, but the flamboyant upward thrust of a thousand gleaming white forms suggests the capacity of spirit to transcend normal spatio-temporal limitations. This is likewise the implication of Nan Smith's "Beyond Illusions," a two-part installation in which a life-sized, polychromed earthenware female figure — eyes closed in reference to intuition, memory and the projection of spirit — confronts an ethereal body denoted only by empty garments. Set within the low metal bench behind the apparition is a nostalgic, illuminated photograph bearing the inscription, "Until we are no longer separated by space and time."

Memory is not always tempered by emotion however, and its contributions to spatio-temporal reasoning and the logic of sequences is the focus of installations by Yves Paquette, Virginia Scotchie, and, to a lesser extent Bill Gilbert. Paquette's "Experience" — consisting of an array of forms abstracted from ordinary objects chosen for their character as "cross-cultural symbols or icons" — issues a challenge to the viewer to discern in exaggerated, reduced or otherwise transformed features enough of a lingering gestalt to identify the original source of inspiration. The memory is called upon to associate past and present perception in an effort to determine the object represented. For the artist, the process of association unfolds on a secondary level as well: each of Paquette's installations over the past eight years is connected to its predecessors conceptually, formally or materially. This same kind of continuity across time and space is implicit in Virginia Scotchie's "Spheres 2001", four vertical grid-like arrangements of shelves bearing ceramic orbs that are finished in varying patterns of colorful crusts and smooth bronze glaze. The viewer, confronting these arrays on four of the gallery's walls, experiences each sphere both as a unique object and as a form in a mental inventory that is tested by memory for patterns of repetition. The surface markings are intended to "separate and, at the same time, unite each sphere," thereby calling into play memory's dual function.

A similar mnemonic trial is inherent in Bill Gilbert's "The Kiss," which incorporates a video screen displaying an image of a kissing couple in which the profiles alternately metamorphose. This perpetual changing of partners tests the memory as traces of previous profiles, including ancient facial tattoos, quickly fade away and new visages emerge in their place. The image is mesmerizing in itself, but Gilbert employs it as a heuristic for processes of transformation too protracted for the human mind fully to comprehend. "The Kiss" largely consists of adobe — unfired earth referring not only to the shifting geology of New Mexico, where Gilbert lives, but the convolutions in the long history of its people and their habitations. Gilbert's work condenses in the space of a moment the colossal crawling of the earth's skin and the generations of ancestors riding its aoenian swells. In this process, time is a constant but its product is a perpetual mutation.

Of the installations in Beyond the Physical, Rebecca Hutchinson's "Northern Stretch" refers most obliquely to the operations of memory. Implicit in her work, however, is a record of history encompassing both natural transformation and the development of human technology. Consisting of four towering but fragile forms woven from fibers dipped in a porcelain slurry, Hutchinson's installation is in part a reflection on the "nesting and colonization habits of insects and birds." Implicit in this analogy is a focus on a kind of species memory, the instinctual practices ingrained through generations of creatures adapting to their environment. One could also read in these elegant woven forms a suggestion of the memory inherent in the ceramic tradition — a popular speculation about the first fired pot is that it was a mud-covered basket accidentally hardened in a fire.

The memory inherent in the ceramic tradition is a key concept for Beyond the Physical. If memory serves as the exhibition's pervasive theme, the fact that this was not calculated and that installations in general do not predominately dwell upon memory, suggests that something about the ceramic installation is especially conducive to this particular focus. Indeed, a broader survey of examples lends support to this conclusion. But what would make memory a more compelling influence on the ceramist than on other artists engaged in installation work?

The answer probably lies in distinctions between the art and craft traditions. The postmodern artist who makes an installation is aware of the manner in which dispersing objects and experiences across space and time constitutes an implicit negation of tradition — the modern tradition of the work of art as an autonomous object. The contemporary ceramist on the other hand, generally approaches the installation from the perspective of the craftsperson who has always conceived of craft objects as functioning with other objects in space and drawing meaning from their place in tradition. The postmodern artist may employ the installation to engage in a kind of erasure in which objects and styles become detached from a larger narrative of history, but the contemporary craftsperson is intent upon remembering. In the ceramic installation memory serves to create a unity of experience in space and across time precisely because the ceramic tradition itself is still conceived as a spatio-temporal continuity. Physical separation is always balanced by a conceptual unification, and memory is at the heart of this process.