In San Geronimo, two monumental vertebrate obelisks stand sentinel in front of the home of sculptor, performance artist and professor Nathan Lynch. Scattered in their glossy presence are dozens more. Puffed-up podiums and deflated, cratered soap boxes, a 5-foot-tall drooping trophy, bathtubs with ceramic bubbles at their feet and an army of amorphous blobs that look equal parts Dr. Seuss and David Cronenberg—wherever one stands, it feels a bit like being inside a cartoon.
Mr. Lynch has been the chair of the ceramics program at California College of the Arts since 2006. Wry and nonchalant, the 49-year-old has the demeanor of a professor and the creative energy of an artist, evidenced by the work strewn across his property. He approaches art with humor and invites interaction. His sculptures often comment on politics and environmentalism—or the folly that can come with both.
“I think a lot of my work has to do with Americans and their well-intentioned efforts going awry. A lot of these sculptures look like they were inflated and then collapsed. Whether it’s fitness, economics, politics or that salmon ladder on the golf course, it comes up all the time—the folly of improvement. And I’m not being critical, but it’s good to laugh at it. Something about the unlimited aspiration of humans to make things better is endlessly amusing to me.”
Mr. Lynch’s work is informed by his upbringing in a conservative pocket of Washington State, where the duck-hunting, football-playing, nuclear-bomb-building ethos has provided plenty of creative fodder in the years since he left. His hometown of Pasco had two main industries: agriculture and nuclear chemicals.
Growing up, Mr. Lynch was precocious in school and in D.I.Y. art projects. Once, on a family trip, he found a how-to book at an ice cream shop for a papier-mâché Noid—the alien-like Domino’s Pizza mascot that was discontinued after it sparked a hostage crisis in the 1980s. Mr. Lynch made dozens of Noids, from a few inches tall to 8 feet high. After a high school summer program at Carnegie Mellon University, he decided that sculpting was his path. “Being up late in the studio by myself was kind of like a high I hadn’t experienced before,” he said.
He soon began making other papier-mâché creatures—scaly green lizards sometimes as tall as himself, with big, goofy grins. After he graduated from high school, Pasco’s local paper, The Tri-City Herald, published a full-page feature on him, with the headline “Monster talent: Pasco sculptor molds promising future in arts with crazy creatures.” He told the Herald about his inspirations—humor, absurdity and conversation starters—and suggested that his sculptures could serve as lawn ornaments. “It may come down to teaching or starving for me, but I wouldn’t mind teaching, either,” he said at the time.
Mr. Lynch had his choice of art schools but eventually decided on the University of Southern California for its forward-thinking approach and proximity to Hollywood. (He initially intended to study special effects.) In his first semester, he signed up for an introductory ceramics class with Ken Price, a leading artist in non-representational ceramics known for his unusual application of glaze and paints.
At the time, the divide between pottery and ceramic sculpting was deep. Mr. Lynch recalled a visit to San Francisco State University, where one professor told him that ceramicists do not “paint” their work, period. Mr. Price, however, was operating in a different realm, applying auto-body lacquer on his work in the late ’50s down in L.A.
“Pottery people thought that was really sacrilegious,” Mr. Lynch said. “I wasn’t raised like that, though. As I see it, you could use bubblegum or piss or wax to make the work you want.”
Mr. Price recognized Mr. Lynch’s potential as both an industrious worker and a creative sculptor. Mr. Lynch would not find another teacher who made as much of an impression until he attended Mills College for graduate school and met Mr. Price’s friend and contemporary, Ron Nagle, a giant in miniature ceramics.
“At the time, ceramics was pretty narrow in terms of what was expected, but Nathan broke out doing all kinds of neat stuff,” Mr. Nagle told the Light. “He became extremely prolific and started to develop his own style based on stuff he had been exposed to. We always say, ‘the magic of momentum.’”
At Mills, Mr. Lynch collaborated with dancers, musicians and other artists, inspiring a foray into performance art. But when he was on stage, Mr. Lynch felt uneasy and vulnerable. To counteract those feelings, he began wearing an orange moped helmet, which he said afforded him a sense of security and protection. “If you already look dorky or stupid, it gives you permission to make a fool of yourself,” he said. “It’s like, I’m just gonna put myself in this place of vulnerability and therefore be more open. It’s a safety blanket.”
After grad school, Mr. Lynch moved to the East Coast in 1999. There he embarked on his first lengthy performance project, “The Wheel.” On and off from 2001 to 2004, Mr. Lynch wore his orange helmet and walked through urban landscapes and small towns, carrying a long, thick rope tugging a 2-foot-diameter pine wheel. The performance was meant to challenge American perceptions of rationality and masculinity. It was like wheeling a suitcase or walking a dog, he said, but it was also like driving an awesome muscle car or riding a horse.
“People would be like, ‘What are you doing?’ and I’d be like, ‘I’m going to the post office, what are you doing?’ If you tell someone it’s art, they don’t try to solve the puzzle, they just put it in this category of things they don’t understand,” he said. “Think of this guy in his big American muscle car showing it off. In a sense, it was kind of like the inverse of that.”
In 2002, Mr. Lynch was at a residency in Snowmass, Colo. when he applied for a teaching position at C.C.A. He worked there part-time for four years until he was offered a position as chair of the ceramics program. The promotion changed his life, giving him the freedom to model his classes on anything to do with ceramics. He has since taught courses on the mud in the San Francisco Bay and on the ceramic shorebird nests he makes for the Farallon Islands, Año Nuevo Island and Oahu.
“I really enjoy thinking about what the stranger corners could be, would be, should be or might be,” he said. “Open doors, open hearts, say yes to everybody.”
The expansive environments of U.S.C. and Mills inspired him to hire teachers who would do the same at C.C.A. Over his two decades of teaching, he has fostered a new generation of cutting-edge ceramic sculptors. Woody De Othello was featured in the Whitney Biennial last year and has been lauded by publications like Art Forum and the New York Times for his experimentation with materials and processes. The Oakland-based sculptor and painter told the Light that it all started under Mr. Lynch’s tutelage.
“Nathan is bulletproof,” said Mr. De Othello, who graduated from C.C.A. in 2017. “He’d let you know that you don’t necessarily need to have all of the language as you process things, but you can trust the impetus with making rather than having the reason or logic to make something. He’s a force out here in the clay community and clay culture. To this day, I’ll still ask him about stuff.”
Inverness resident Mariah Nielson started studying architecture at C.C.A. the same year Mr. Lynch was hired. She was familiar with his work when she visited his former studio in San Francisco to see if he would fabricate the first line of ceramic cups modeled after one of her father JB Blunk’s hand-crafted sets. He declined the job but referred her to another studio. Last year, Ms. Nielson curated “Same Blue as the Sky,” an exhibit that featured the work of Mr. Lynch and other coastal Marin artists.
“There’s a real playfulness, a real humor there,” Ms. Nielson said of his work. “The shapes and the propositions and the suggestions—they’re cheerful. His work really slips between the functional and the decorative and I think he enjoys that slippage.”
Mr. Lynch said flipping the narrative on the concept of function—and prioritizing experience—is what drives his creativity.
“When I was a student, if I made something remotely functional, somebody’s always going to put a f—king flower in it: ‘Oh, it’s a vase!’” he said. “If there’s an openness or invitation, that opens up a new thing for me. For me, [a piece is] not finished until a person is interacting with it.”
“Doubledrink,” a 3-foot-tall white ceramic drinking fountain he made for the Headlands Center for the Arts, features a large basin, two spigots and one button. The piece, commissioned by the center in 2017, requires drinkers to come face to face as they awkwardly slurp water.
In 2014, Mr. Lynch was asked to contribute to Bay Area Now’s seventh triennial at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. The tall, shimmering sculptures that now sit on either side of his driveway were a part of “Dead Reckoning,” an interactive exhibition that addressed the precarity of human presence amid environmental and economic fragility. The forms reference wayfinding buoys, Mr. Lynch said.
“San Francisco was really lost coming out of the housing crisis and I was making these markers for finding our way,” he said. “There are a number of different buoy meanings. The best one is the unknown hazard—the one that says, ‘There’s something below here and we don’t know what it is.’”
Mr. Lynch continues to navigate the concepts of folly and interaction. His work will be shown alongside Point Reyes Station woodblock and paper artist John Gnorski and Sonoma fiber artist Jessica Switzer at the Jones Institute in San Francisco in an exhibit opening tomorrow. The diverse textures of the show offer a broad interpretation of functionality and are imbued with a distinctly Northern Californian artistry.
To learn more, go to https://www.studioahead.com/the-lily-too-shall-function.