Ceramic contemporaries 4

Opening Date: 2002-Apr-10
Closing Date: 2003-Jul-12
This output provided an opportunity to show work from an ongoing body of research, in the context of a nationally touring show organised by NACHE (the National Association of Ceramics in Higher Education) to provide an overview of contemporary practice and selected by a jury of four nationally and internationally renowned artists, critics and curators. (Edmund de Waal, Andrew Lord, Keeley Traae and Moira Vincentelli).
My area of research is into the making and context for display of abstract ceramic sculpture. Conceptually the work is rooted in the exploration of the relationship between 'artificial' (mechanical, ordered, hard, reductive) and 'natural' (organic, soft, disordered, accretive) aesthetics, and by association the tension and resolution between polarities in a broader sense. I am specifically looking at the assumed aesthetic outcomes of various techniques and processes of fabrication in ceramic and whether these have any inevitability. By innovating within processes, particularly by reversal, I seek to find new outcomes particularly in their relationship to the visual themes being explored. Positive and negative space are key elements; a carved plaster form is evidenced in the final ceramic object only as a void. Ceramic material is built around the plaster, this body being made up of an altered casting slip containing various aggregates, developed for its variety of visual and physical textures, and uncontrollability in the plastic state. I grind, polish and often gild works after firing, producing an apparent cross-section through a larger absent object. The polished and gilded surfaces produce a dissonance between the rough appearance of the aggregate material and a smooth tactile finish.