Material Memories - Ceramics Process

Klytie Pate Award 2018

Delighted to be selected to participate in the Kyltie Pate Award again this year. 

Klytie Pate Award and Exhibition 

Opening Tuesday 6 March 6pm (speeches at 6:30)

Exhibition 7-14 March open daily 10am to 4pm

MAG - 4 Highett Street

Mansfield Vic 3722

Tel 0407 664 202

This year's entry is part of a new body of work that continues to look at the contours, colours of landscape particular around the high country around Mansfield and Merrijig.

Entitled River Vessel, this pot also brings in the colours and rhythmic textures of the Delatite River. 

Material Memories Exhibition - Two Influential Women

Material Memories Statement

I remember a bleached white sky melding with the sea in the heat of the day which by evening was consumed by a sea mist that rolled in and stayed until morning. I peered over sheer cliffs made from a stone so hard it refuses to crumble but remains vertical and awesome. I marked the land for four days, carrying sustenance through this coastal landscape, footstep after footstep measuring the distance with a physical action of my body, accumulating memories of this place. 

Afterwards I ask:

How can the ceramic process and clay material embody the place?

This question arises and is a response to two influential works from the QVMAG collection by Tasmanian women, Bea Maddock who was born in Hobart and Trucanini of the Nuenonny Clan. 

Bea Maddock’s 'Terra Spiritus... With a Darker Shade of Pale', 1993-1998 is a circumlittoral incised drawing in of the entire coastline of Tasmania, each geographic feature is labelled with both the English and the aboriginal Tasmanian topographic names. The pigments used to make the colour the paper are native Tasmanian ochres. Trucanini’s Woven basket, c.1870, uses fibres of the White Flag Iris, which is particular to the eastern coast of Tasmania. 

Both these women make objects with an extricable connection to coastal Tasmania through lived experience and through use of local geology and vegetation. Both works use hand skill to create, making the maker and the time spent making evident and present in the wo

Trucanini, Woven basket, c 1870, fibres of the white flag iris 

(Probably the last basket made by Tasmanian Aboriginal women Trucanini (Nuenonny Clan)

Bea Maddock, TERRA SPIRITUS ... with a darker shade of pale 1993-1998
hand-ground ochre and blind letterpress on 52 sheets
(a-zz) 26.5 x 76.0 cm (image and sheet) (each)
 

Material Memories - Landscape Inspiration

Three Capes Walk, Tasmania
Saturday 27 January - Tuesday 30 January 2018

New Work as 2017 Draws to a Close

Questions asked

How might I make a vessel using my visual concerns about place & environment?
How can I continue to make texture that relates to me? In additional to my pinching technique or instead of?

Continued themes

Sense of place in particular Delatite River & landscape.
My significant tree, Mountain Eucalyptus.

Starting point is the last work made at the Northcote Residency

This work is now part of the Northcote Pottery collection. Use of slabs and coiling. 

Process & Revelations 

Texture on slabs created by knuckle, river stones, fingertips and a little pinching rather than entirely formed from coil and pinch. 

Making QUICKLY. Responding to CURVES and CONTOURS from slab throwing. 

 

Works which directly expression the tree

Using foliage cotour for rim

Large quickly made slabs

Subtle texture (fingertips) combined with deeply impressed texture
No reference to 'literal' tree silhouette
Love the broader surface the the wrap connection

Material Memories Exhibition - Visiting the Collection

The Invitation

Delighted to have been invited to participate in this exhibition curated by Sarah Stubbs.

The project entitled Material Memories is about connecting six contemporary artists with small object collections bequeathed by Tasmanians to the Queen Victorian Museum and Art Gallery.

The parameters of the project are to open a discussion and explore methods of materiality, through the mapping of existing objects in order to reveal the story of place and visual memory.

Through material inventions, we seek to construct new memories, fictions and poetic narratives that speak of our conceptual construction of place. 

We seek to use the act of making as a legitimate means to ask: How can an object define or translate our sensory perception and physical experiences of space and place?

The Artists 

Janine Coombs, Penelope Davis, Eli Giannini, Sue Buchanan, Sarah Stubbs and Myself.

TMAG - Mining the Museum

In late November 2017, we were given access to TMAG's natural, cultural and artistic collections and guided through by amazingly generous staff. 

My initial plan was to look at the scrimshaw as TMAG has a world class collection. The qualities of the scratching into the white bone was compelling and complimentary to sgrafitto on porcelain clay. This might be a process in which to depict a narrative that evolves.

It was quite humbling to handle these objects of great longing was what is no longer or is far away. Much of the imagery inscribed was of women & courtship in a most intimate but well-mannered presentation. Designs by more naive hands were of simple beauty, the joy of creating something decorative such as vase of flowers. 

  

 

 

Aboriginal woven baskets and string bags have been on interest since my ceramics studies at RMIT. This bag is particularly fine. Melbourne Museum has an incredible collection of bags.

 

 This selection blew our craftswomen's minds. The intricacy of technique, the fineness of material and  clearly apparent love and respect in the making.

 

 The Proclamation Cup is a disturbing in it's banality the maker Violet Mace created this work in 1935, whose narrative decoration is based Governor Arthur's Proclamation board which was painted in 1829.  It is a complex history and oblique in its intent.

  

The remainder of these images are of weird wonderful and indicative things of Launceston, Tasmania and museums collecting in general.