In the year 306 Margaret of Antioch, then aged approximately 15, was brutally and cruelly tortured for refusing to renounce her Christian faith. The narrative of events varies from source to source but typically includes iron combs being used to tear her flesh down to the bone. Returned to her cell by her jailers, after this tearing of flesh, Margaret prays that her true tormentor be revealed to her whereupon Satan, in dragon form, appears in her cell and devours her. From within the dragon Margaret makes the sign of the cross causing the dragon’s body to explode and thus releasing Margaret, alas, back into the hands of her tormentors who proceed to inflict further agonies until finally decapitating her along with five thousand other Christians whom Margaret has converted to the faith.

Such bloody tales of anguish, wounding and resilience haunt the eve’s of Mary Carlson’s rural Catskills’ studio. There, small, lightly glazed ceramic figures of saints and demons are presented atop podia that allow eye to eye contact from martyr to viewer. Or, more casually, more ‘in-process’, one can find the saints gathering in small communities atop lower, work tables alongside piles of glaze-tests. These latter are small tiles of ceramic, manufactured, glazed and fired by the artist, showing various hues and tints of glazed color upon them. Cryptic, to the uninitiated, pen markings record the chemical formulas of each glaze. Alchemists’ notations come to mind.

Carlson’s delicate sculptures (one is aware of how very breakable they are as one circles them atop their podia) are embedded in the hagiographic narratives of Catholicism but also in the extrusions of those tales through the course of art history. Giotto, Fra Angelico, Massaccio, Breughel  are all cited by Carlson as iconographic, Ur references. In this way Carlson’s work profers a manifold address. It is an address to art history and to the Chrisian narrative. And, reciprocally, and more covertly, it is an address to art history’s implication in promoting such narratives. In a visit to her studio one takes a road trip though both sainthood and renaissance painting, while the stow away is how those two have courted and inflamed one another through their history.

Facile at her practice, and the science of it, Carlson deploys light ethereal glazes to limn the presence of spirit. These are flickering colors that angle for the life force of saintliness, something above and beyond the merely human. At another turn she gives us rough hewn stoneware. This latter offers an unfinished feel, a  sandpapery, abrasive facture that seems to say there is much still to be figured out. Over and against one another these two highly tactile, highly resonant surfaces constitute the vanguard of Carlson’s sculpture; the point where it reaches out to meet its viewer. It is in this first contact that we the viewer begin our own ‘narrating’ of art history and Christian narrative, recognizing perhaps a motif here or a particular painting there.

And so, Margaret of Antioch, a recurring figure for Carlson, is handled varyingly in response to different sources. In early renaissance painter Agnolo Gaddi Carlson encounters Margaret emerging in profile from the dragon’s jaws, crucifix grasped firmly and tenderly in her right hand. In an altarpiece of 1380 by the Master of Trebon, Carlson finds Margaret cradling in her arm and all but petting the seemingly domesticated dragon. In Carlson’s glazed sculptures the saints’ faces reach out to us with pin point eyes brimming with sentience.

With Francisco de Zurbaran Margaret is offered as standing before a fierce but cowed dragon. In Zurbaran’s carefully and closely rendered image of Margaret, the saint comes to us as, consistent with her noble birth, a richly garmented figure propped with literature –a book– sun hat and walking staff. The same figure returns to us via Carlson’s studio as a roughly formed figurine of unglazed stoneware; it is a base, rustic material. Absent a glaze, absent color Margaret of Antioch is inscrutable, an emotional ghost. Zurbaran’s rendering gives Margaret a realness, a real figure of noble birth; Carlson’s offers a preliminariness. This is a saint, an icon, a fable in becoming (or un-becoming, one might suppose). Carlson is pausing the narrative and the apparent devotional trajectory of the work at the very point where we might be expected to recognize both: at the surface of the sculpture. Zurbaran tells the tale very clearly, Carlson with a formal side turn deliberately stalls the story In Media Res. The stalling subtracts pathos from the figures. They vulnerably yield their surface to our gaze. It is akin to a test of faith posed to saints, it is a moment where we must doubt our knowledge of the narrative. It is in this formal alertness that Carlson straddles a dialogue between familiarity and doubt, between history and fable. She, thus, opens up a space of mis-recognition where narratives fumble and conclusions are less certain.

Turning a different cultural corner Carlson is fully aware that even though, or perhaps because,  Hummels were spawned by a Catholic nun, small ceramic figurines cannot escape a conversation with Kitsch. And so Carlson has that conversation. Her sculptures sometimes offer, if never fully, glimmers of, the instantaneous emotional gratification and knownness that Kitsch demands. And she is not beyond using, to heart rending effect, one of those cheap plastic cocktail swords as a prop for Catherine of Alexandria. That Carlson supersedes the evocations of kitsch is down to this precise attention of hers to finishes and glazes. All those glaze-tests piling up on the work tables pay off. It is through the ethereally luminous and the rough pumice surfaces that affiliations like Kitsch or the sacramental are both summoned and flummoxed. To summon Kitsch through its easy formulas and to then scatter it like fleeting shadows allows just the right haunting of the sacred narrative. Dialed up or down to just the right quotient, as Carlson does it, kitsch betrays the animist superstition hiding behind a Giotto altarpiece or a Fra Angelico fresco.

Finally, on the far side of the manicheistic dialectic of Christianity lies the demon. Demons eat saints, demons tempt the faithful, corrupt the soul. However, Carlson’s demons also brim with emotion. An anguished blue face smeared with lipstick (or blood I suppose) with contorted limbs  of nakedness and yellow eyes of sulphur squatting atop a slender podium seems to yearn for the viewers compassionate touch. Another, a Dog Demon, squats eyes raised in a plaintiff look as if the runt of a demon litter. Another, a peg legged, buzzard looking demon, eyes a-brim with tears, yearns for a hug, a warm hearth, a happy home. That the demon should evoke tenderness is congruent with the emotional landscape that Carlson’s work brings forth. It is of a part with her saints who all imply an emotional ambiguity of relatedness beyond their inscription in the Catholic cannon. More novelistic than conventionally sculptural, the work as a whole lets dangle nodes of literary-religious story telling, without ever subscribing to the party-line, even as it sources itself in the visual history of Christianity’s icons.