There is a particular hush that falls over the gallery when standing before one of Rebecca Manson’s vast butterfly wings. At first glance, they appear impossibly delicate—tattered membranes suspended mid-air, their eyespots flickering in lavender, rust, and molten gold. Then the realization lands: each wing is built from thousands upon thousands of small porcelain fragments, pressed by hand, glazed, fired, and assembled into a form that feels at once ancient and newly molted.

Manson, born in New York in 1989 and now based in Brooklyn, has become one of the most compelling voices in contemporary ceramics. A graduate of the ceramics department at the Rhode Island School of Design (BFA, 2011), she possesses both formidable technical control and a willingness to test the limits of her medium. Her subject is nature—not as idyllic backdrop, but as teacher, witness, and mirror.

In her recent solo exhibition, Rebecca Manson: Time, You Must Be Laughing, at Jessica Silverman, she expands her exploration of metamorphosis, movement, and memory, pushing ceramics toward an almost operatic scale.

The Poetry of the “Smush”

Manson’s sculptures begin not with a wheel or mold, but with a gesture she calls the “smush.” From a sketch printed onto canvas—often accompanied by digital mockups and glaze tests—she traces a monumental silhouette. Then comes the labor: hundreds, sometimes hundreds of thousands, of small bits of clay flattened in the palm of her hand.

The word “smush” sounds playful, even trivial. The act is repetitive, menial. Yet this is precisely the point. Manson transforms these humble gestures into fields of luminous complexity. Each porcelain fragment is bisque-fired, then glazed—dunked by the handful, sprayed, hand-painted, or layered with experimental chemistry.

Variety is the name of the game.

– She has said of her glaze process, which often yields as many surprises as successes.

The cumulative effect is staggering. In certain works, upwards of 200,000 porcelain pieces undulate across a single pair of wings. Lavender bleeds into crimson; beige fractures into iridescent blues. The surface reads like a living pelt—feathered, scaled, trembling with chromatic depth.

Glass, too, slips into her compositions. Inspired by stray glaze droplets discovered in her kiln, Manson began incorporating kiln-formed glass and bent sheet glass. Against the matte tactility of porcelain, these reflective elements catch and scatter light, heightening the illusion of movement.

Ceramics, historically tethered to utility and containment, becomes in her hands something atmospheric—nearly aerodynamic.

Exploding Butterfly: Motion Suspended

Among the most arresting works in Time, You Must Be Laughing is Exploding Butterfly (2025), a four-part installation spanning two walls and spilling onto the gallery floor. Fragments of wings appear frozen mid-detonation, their edges torn and curling, their kaleidoscopic eyespots intact.

Originally titled Roadkill, the work underwent a late renaming—an evolution that mirrors its thematic core. The new title emphasizes dynamism over tragedy. The butterfly is not merely fallen; it is caught in an arrested burst of energy.

The installation can be configured differently depending on the space, underscoring Manson’s fascination with movement. The work exists in a perpetual state of potential rearrangement. Even still, it feels kinetic. One senses that if time resumed, the fragments might either scatter further or miraculously reassemble.

The exhibition title itself borrows from Joni Mitchell’s 1975 song “Sweet Bird,” a meditation on aging and impermanence. For Manson, time is not an antagonist but a collaborator—an unseen sculptor shaping decay, growth, and memory.

The Swing: Nostalgia in Porcelain and Steel

A departure from her wing motif, The Swing (2022–2025) marks one of Manson’s most ambitious undertakings. Monumental and hauntingly precise, the sculpture resembles a weathered steel swing set, its chains and seats arrested mid-arc.

Yet the entire structure—metallic surfaces included—is crafted by Manson in ceramic. What appears industrial reveals itself as painstakingly handmade.

Developed over nearly four years, the piece accrued layers of addition and dormancy. Manson would revisit it, rework it, let it rest. The sculpture draws from a formative memory during orientation week at RISD: an impromptu visit to a rickety playground swing, the exhilaration of reckless motion balanced by the fear of collapse. “Just surrender,” a friend told her as the swing soared.

The work captures that threshold between childhood and adulthood—the vertiginous instant when freedom and fragility coexist. Its surfaces recall lichen-covered steel slowly succumbing to time, echoing Manson’s rural observations north of New York City, where beauty often resides in weathered decay.

Here, time does not erode; it embellishes.

Nature as Witness and Teacher

Although butterfly and moth wings have become Manson’s signature, she resists confinement to a single motif. Earlier floral works, such as Mother’s Day Sunflower (2022), suggest that her engagement with nature remains expansive. Residencies, including one with The Arctic Circle, exposed her to the stark vulnerability of melting polar landscapes—an encounter that reshaped her understanding of survival and grief.

Death does not always imply sadness.

– She has reflected.

In nature, transformation is constant, unromantic, inevitable.

Her sculptures embody that philosophy. Tattered edges coexist with radiant patterning. Fragility becomes monument. The ceramic medium—once thought brittle—achieves tensile grace through accumulation and devotion.

Monumental Intimacy

Manson’s career has accelerated in recent years, with exhibitions spanning Ballroom Marfa’s “Perhaps the Truth,” London’s Josh Lilley, and institutional presentations at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth and Arsenal Contemporary Art in Montreal. Her debut public art exhibition, Come Closer and the View Gets Wider, currently installed in Tribeca Park, extends her inquiry into open-air space.

Yet regardless of scale—seven-foot wings draped across walls or towering playground structures—her work retains intimacy. Each “smush” bears the imprint of a palm. Each glaze test registers an experiment. Thousands of gestures converge into a single organism.

Standing before her sculptures, one senses the paradox at the heart of Manson’s practice: the monumental built from the minute; the durable formed from fragile acts; the spectacle rooted in repetition.

In transforming thousands of so-called menial gestures into radiant architectures of porcelain, Rebecca Manson offers more than visual splendor. She offers a meditation on time’s passage, on the persistence of memory, and on the quiet, transformative power of the human hand.