Ray Meeker's recent exhibition at the Indian Habitat Centre, New Delhi, marks a turning point in his illustrious career moving from architecture to pottery to building kilns to firing houses to serious ceramic sculpture and large-scale installation. 

Ray and his wife Deborah Smith are well-known in South Asia for their Golden Bridge Pottery in Pondicherry, famous for bringing beautiful stoneware and porcelain table accessories to India 35 years ago, and for training others in their way and work. Ray and Deborah have brought a singular new awareness to the understanding and acceptance of varied levels of contemporary style in Indian, ceramic art. With their continuous research and development, both technically and artistically over so many years, they have spearheaded the culmination of ceramic artworks by many others, and the growth of ceramic art in the Indian gallery scene. 

Interestingly, in this exhibition Ray has been accorded new stature in the aesthetic community. His traditional forms and elegant glazes are transposed into amazing sculptures of huge proportions and exciting textures, richly accented with patina of fly ash from high temperature wood fire. Bearing some semblance in magnitude and in spirit to his well-known experiments in fired mud architecture, these new handbuilt  hollow craggy forms are imposing in the gallery setting, to say the least. Great strength and perseverance are essential to accomplish the technical feats needed to fabricate massive scale in clay. Ray has mastered and overcome these difficulties with such skill that only the art is visible, not the effort. 

Now Ray finalizes a long search for a definitive statement in clay, returning to themes that first appeared in his work over thirty years ago and as an undergraduate in the ceramics department at the University of Southern California. In 2001, his explorations of monumental scale and environmental issues resurfaced in Kurukshetra, his first exhibition with Peter Nagy and the Nature Morte Gallery in New Delhi. In Subject to Change without Notice we see this statement fully mature and yet know that without a doubt this show will form the basis for new beginnings, for the development of another layer piled upon the current structure, and that we will not be aware of the total struggle, only of the diversified understandings of form and clay quality that Ray's work brings to all who can make the connection. We hope for a continued growth pattern evidenced by new thoughts, for more boundless energy, and we look forward to Ray's next visual explorations. Hats off to you Ray!

Susan Peterson, Monumental Challenge 
October, 2004