Fire Watcher
PRESS RELEASE
EVENT: Porterville College Art Gallery: Fire Watcher: Works by Pascual Arriaga
DATES OF SHOW: October 5 – October 29, 2026
OPENING: Monday, October 5, 2026 at the Porterville College Art Gallery, 12 – 4 pm
GALLERY HOURS: Monday – Thursday from 12 – 4 pm
PRESS RELEASE
Fire Watcher: Works by Pascual Arriaga
Porterville College Art Gallery presents Fire Watcher, a solo exhibition by ceramic artist Pascual Arriaga. Bringing together functional pottery, ceramic sculpture, found objects, and installation, the exhibition considers making as a response to a chaotic and unpredictable world. For Arriaga, the ceramic studio is a refuge where noise subsides, time slows, and the complexity of experience can temporarily be reduced to clay, movement, pressure, and breath. Through the deliberate shaping of material into form, function, and beauty, each vessel becomes what Arriaga describes as “a small act of resistance against chaos.”
Yet the control Arriaga finds at the wheel is temporary. Once a carefully formed object enters the kiln, the artist must surrender a degree of authority over what it will become. This tension between control and uncertainty provides the conceptual foundation for Fire Watcher. Arriaga draws upon the longstanding ceramic tradition of the kiln god, a figure placed within the studio as a guardian of the firing process. As Arriaga explains, kiln gods “stand before the fire as witnesses to a transformation that the maker can begin but never completely control.” Throughout the exhibition, his sculptural figures are housed within or supported by kiln components, transforming the physical apparatus of ceramic production into part of the artwork itself. The kiln becomes more than a tool: it is a threshold where intention encounters heat, chemistry, chance, and forces beyond the maker’s control.
Alongside these conceptual works, Arriaga presents an extensive body of functional ceramics, including vases, bowls, bottles, and other vessels that demonstrate his command of throwing, form, color, glaze, surface, and firing. These objects move between traditional ceramic presentation and contemporary installation. Weathered wooden bee boxes become individual compartments for an array of vessels, while an old ladder fitted with whitewashed shelves supports groups of bowls. By placing carefully crafted ceramics within worn utilitarian structures, Arriaga brings the traditions of functional pottery into conversation with the visual language of installation art. The vessels therefore function both as beautifully resolved objects in their own right and as part of the exhibition’s larger meditation on making, transformation, and uncertainty.
Arriaga also extends this meditation beyond the ceramic studio. One installation recalls the COVID-19 era through handmade ceramic bottles presented in containers bearing the seal of the U.S. Treasury. The objects connect consumption and escape with survival, crisis, and institutional support, recalling a period when individuals sought different ways of enduring circumstances largely beyond their control. Within Fire Watcher, the work expands Arriaga’s consideration of uncertainty from the individual experience of the maker to a period of collective instability.
These ideas converge in What We Give, an installation structured around the ancient idea of an offering. An apple, bottles, a COVID relief package, and a bowl of baby heads carry associations with strength, labor, mortality, consumption, crisis, innocence, vulnerability, and the future. Arriaga describes these objects not as requests for a perfect outcome but as acknowledgments of uncertainty: “These offerings are not prayers for perfection. They are acts of surrender. Then we close the kiln. What happens inside is no longer ours to decide.”
The title Fire Watcher ultimately describes both an activity and a condition. At the wheel, Arriaga can impose order upon clay, constructing an existence shaped, however temporarily, by form, function, and beauty. At the kiln, that authority becomes conditional. The artist can prepare the material, tend the process, and watch the fire, but cannot completely determine what emerges. Functional vessels, kiln gods, found structures, and installations consequently converge around a shared proposition: when the world cannot be controlled, something can still be made.
Fire Watcher: Works by Pascual Arriaga opens October 5 at the Porterville College Art Gallery from 12:00–4:00 PM. The exhibition will remain on view Monday through Thursday, 12:00–4:00 PM, through October 29. For more information, please contact Gallery Director Theodore Lyons at theodore.lyons@portervillecollege.edu.
