Nicolette Johnson

High Spirits
November 2020 (first exhibition after lockdown)

Sophie Gannon Gallery
2 Albert Street Richmond VIC 3121 Australia

 

 

Jane McKenzie & Minaal Lawn

Intersections

Work from Jane McKenzie @janeamckenzie
and Minaal Lawn @minaal_lawn_ceramics

CLAD, Bendigo Pottery @bendigopottery

June 2020 (visiting in-between lockdown)

This show highlights ceramic sculpture work that is made in components. Both artists keep the process, unhidden using stacking, balancing, insertion to highlight 'intersections' of where clay join pieces 'meet'. I suspect some slip and slurry has been used as well!

CLAD Gallery has gorgeous light and clean material space. 

Jane McKenzie

A favorite piece where the artist has left the wrinkles caused when bending the slab or the 'action of making' on the clay. 

Minaal Lawn

Pandemic Exhibition - Kirsten Perry online

Michael Reid is a gallerist who pliest their trade across numerous locations: Sydney, Berlin, and Murrundundi.

Added to this physical location and perhaps in light of C-19s necessary restrictions, Reid has created a new site called CLAY. This seems to be promoted as an online exhibition. The first (that I have heard of) is Kirsten Perry, Melbourne based slip moulding artist. The 'exhibition' runs from 1-30 April 2020.

To look at Kirsten's work go to:

https://michaelreidclay.com.au/exhibition/kirsten-perry/

Artists represented who work in clay are:

https://michaelreidclay.com.au/artists/

Keith Haring - Pots!

Crossing Lines
National Gallery of Victoria - International
1 December 2019 - Covid-19

Alana Wilson

Three Artist Forms, Colours (with focus on Alana)
The Reading Room
14 March 2020 

Lene Kuhl Jakobsen

What We Know Now24 February - 28 March 2020
Craft

The consequences of climate change and the prescient effects it causes to food production is of worldwide concern. What We Know Now seeks to convey how to produce such as fruit will be affected. Many farming areas are experiencing the effects of rising temperatures; fruits are drying out and spoiling before ripening. Other areas are being inundated by flooding events or rising sea levels, damaging the crops and exposing them to fungal diseases. It is predicted that if the average temperature increase is not limited to 2 degrees our food security could be under threat. The usual colours and taste of fruit may then only resign in our memory.

‘What We Know Now’ is a chapter heading (used with permission) from the novel ‘Things We Didn’t See Coming’ by author Steven Amsterdam.
                                                                                                                                                   @kuhl.ceramics
lenekuhl.com
lenekuhl.com

Lene will donate $10 from the sale of each work to WithOneSeed.org.au

—

Lene Kuhl Jakobsen is an award-winning Melbourne-based ceramicist. Having grown up in Denmark, Jakobsen studied ceramics at an Art and Craft School, followed by work at production pottery in Copenhagen. After spending a year in Norway at a ceramics studio, Jakobsen moved to Melbourne where she now has a home studio with an electric kiln. Jakobsen makes a wide range of functional works as well as sculptural exhibition pieces. She has exhibited widely in both solo and group exhibitions locally and internationally.

(https://www.craft.org.au/craft-whats-on-events/2019/whatweknownow)

Elegy

Gallery Funaki
10 March - 9 April 2020

Cara Johnson 

Wood Duck, Hollow

Maureen Faye-Chauhan

A lament for the know and unknown

Lisa Waup

Mama

Maree Clarke

River Reed, 2020

Kyoko Hashimoto

Coal Necklace

Inari Kiuru

I remember forest

EARTHCRAFT

Anna Schwartz Gallery

14 March 2020 (last day before shutdown...)

Including titles such as:

Snakeloop Flat Drop
Fall Measure
Empty Sculpture
Mobius and I 
Line
Collapsed Line
Sphere
Tear Flat Drop

Mikala Dwyer

EARTHCRAFT

Anna Schwartz Gallery
Melbourne

March 2020

Titles include:
Snakeloop Flat Drop
Fall Measure
Empty Sculpture
Fall
Mobius and I 
Line
Sphere
Tear Flat Drop

Alexandra Standen

physical nature

This Is No Fantasy

26 February 2020

Simple Softness, 2019 Southern Ice Porcelain, lustre, $3500

The Grand Tazi, 2020 Hand built terracotta, metallic glaze, $4500

Cherry Pits, 2020 Hand built black clay, metallic clay  

Kate Tucker

Held

Daine Singer, rear 90 Moor Street, Fitzroy 3065

26 February 2020

Interesting combination of materials acrylic, acrylic medium on canvas, calico, cardboard, glazed earthenware base. 

Peaks

Fuse

Do It Yourself

Patch work

Kate Tucker: Held, catalogue essay by Amelia Wallin

“The history of framing,” writes artist Celine Conderili, “is impossible to find” (Support Structures 2009: 9). That which holds, supports, underwrites, and sustains is often overlooked, it is so entangled within the minutia of everyday life that it cannot be subtracted from it. From the scaffolding that upholds buildings to the reproductive labour that sustains us, the familiarity and ordinariness of support is responsible for its omission. In Held, Kate Tucker’s current exhibition at Daine Singer in Melbourne, the act of upholding is equal to that which is held and the apparatus of support is celebrated. 

Materially ambiguous, and often small in scale, what Tucker terms her “slab paintings” and their ceramic counterparts are none the less monumental. In 2015 Tucker first exhibited a series of paintings with ceramic supports designed to delicately uphold her small canvases. Over a five year process, the ceramic structures have expanded to surpass their function as supportive apparatus. In Tucker’s most recent series, colours and patterns are extended from the plane of the canvas onto the ceramics, creating the effect of a symbiotic unit where neither element is more dominant despite their material and functional discrepancies. Material polarities extend throughout the exhibition, as the artist experiments with absorption and repulsion in the form of slick glazed ceramics, porous earthenware, and acrylic paint across multiple surfaces.

Drawing from a proficiency with Photoshop and a past life as a textile and digital designer, Tucker’s paintings are materially dense. Not content with the constraints of the canvas, Tucker devised her layering technique to mimic the openness of digital operations such as Photoshop, specifically the ability to go back and rework imagery across various layers. Through her processes of layering paint, glue and fabric, the artist’s materials — canvas, linen, cotton, digitally printed cotton, cardboard, acrylic  — are indivisible from each other. The absorption, expansion and hardening of each layer give form to the duration of their making. The result is a weighty object, situated between painting and sculpture.    

For many artists, time in the studio comes always at the expense of something else. Tucker’s works evoke the discipline and endurance of a studio practice and the unspoken sacrifices that this entails. The three earthenware sculptures of grasping hands, “Attend”, “Assurance”, and “Entangled” (all 2019) evoke this sense of struggle. For these works, Tucker drew inspiration from vintage DIY instructional manuals, illustrated with black and white photographs of disembodied gesturing hands, engaged in various tasks of fixing, building, making. In their sculptural form, the hands are at once supportive and restrictive, nurturing and containing. 

To be held is to be nurtured, supported, cared for, but one can also be held back. Countless women have written about the challenges of motherhood in the context of the arts in particular. The isolating experiences of motherhood led artist Moyra Davey to compile and edit The Mother Reader, a collection of texts on the ambivalence of motherhood, writing, art and shame. In her introduction to the volume, Davey speaks of the treasure hunt like the experience of discovering sources in the footnotes, citations, and introductions of texts, through which she unearthed a community of writers struggling with the expectations and conditions of motherhood in a Western context. Tucker too, speaks of the challenges of being an artist parent; the limits of time, the enduring demands of care. Like the frame beyond the picture, motherhood is commonly thought of as supportive or supplementary, and as with all support systems, its everywhere-ness makes it an elusive concept to grapple with. Yet through its attention to that which upholds, Tucker’s exhibition realigns the supportive with the supported. Held reminds us of the structures, systems, and applications of support that may go unnoticed.

- Amelia Wallin, 2020