Tania Rolland - New Songs

23 September - 8 October 2017

Skepsi @ Malvern

Plus Workshop 

New Songs presents a new direction for Rolland where she has used a richer palette of colours across the entire surface of the vessel. Rolland's plays with our familiarity of universal forms from ceramic history such as the urn, plum blossom vase and bottle. Rolland's pinching marks are left to flitter across the surface of these pots, trays and slabs. These indentations capture pigment and reveal the rhythmic course of her fingers. 

Rolland generously revealed much of her surface treatment in the workshop given at Skepsi @ Malvern on Sunday 24 September. Coloured engobes, are drawn or washed over coloured clay and paper masked areas. All this is then is then rubbed or sanded back. 

The resulting surfaces are a dense but translucent record of mark making. 

Tania Rolland is an ever inspiring artist whose constant questioning and desire to make meaning in  her practice. This effort is translated into poetic forms for us to experience emotionally. 

During her artist talk, Rolland explained  that the making of 'art is a special kind of paying attention'. The context of her practice sits firmly within the realm of Modernism, where she explores grand and simple truths; truth to material and to looking directly.'

This reminds me of Grayson Perry's thoughts on the role of the artist and that is 'to notice things'. Perry looks outward, to societal concerns and cultural affectations. Rolland looks within. 

Holly & last vestiges,  porcelain & ceramic stain

sub rosa,  porcelain & ceramic stain

last vestiges, porcelain & ceramic stain

detail last vestiges, porcelain & ceramic stain

detail last vestiges, porcelain & ceramic stain

florescence & shimmer,  porcelain & ceramic stain h. 34cm

deep midnight,  porcelain & ceramic stain

Workshop Reveals

'how to' for chalks, engobes, testing & recording of colours 

making of hump mould for consistent and supported vessel base,  pinching, , masking

Bec Smith - Peach Bloom

This brief exhibition was a feast for the senses. Bec uses a feather-light pinching technique, creating egg-shell thin vessels that seem to float above the plinth. Surfaces create a haptic desire to caress.

Often surfaces are 'iced', 'sugared' and 'glazed' with what temptingly looks like edible material. 

Part of this exhibition could be consumed, with floor plinths dusted with sugar and little piles of sugared rose petals to delight the tongue.

A ceramic oil diffuser filled the exhibition space with caramel or fudge smells - delicious. 

A clearly articulated exhibition exploring the relationship between food, vessels, blossom and sense of touch and taste from this recent RMIT graduate.

8-10 June 2017 (Fours days only!)

Guild of Objects

Meet Bec Smith with this interview here

Dean Smith - Pink Terraces

Dean Smith's solo show exemplifies his mastery of matt crystalline glaze. Look carefully at the seamless additions of fused glass.  I particularly like his vertical, 'pillowy-soft' vessel to show of his sublte glaze palette & crystal patterning. 

 4-22 April 2017

Alcaston Gallery

11 Brunswick Street, Fitzroy,
Melbourne, Victoria, 3065 Australia

Entombment 11 (detail), 2017, Fine stoneware, porcelain, thrown hand-built, matt crystalline glaze, fused-glass enamel, h.26cm

Pink Terrace, 2017, fine stoneware, feldspathic glaze, pigment glass enamel-fused, gold leaf and pigment applied

Self Preservation 11, 2017, Cordierite refractor, Kangaroo bone, feldspathic glaze, glass enamel & pigment-fused

Permanence, 2017, Fine stoneware, porcelain, thrown hand-built, matt crystalline glaze, fused-glass enamel

Primitive Equations11, 2017, stoneware, porcelain, thrown hand built metallic glaze, fused-glass enamel, oil paint, h. 22cm

 

Black 11 , 2016 fine stoneware, micro crystalline glazes, glass enamels, applied gold leaf, h. 61cm

The Pink Terrace was once a large and beautiful silica deposit in New Zealand, created by chance and destroyed by chance, possibly by an eruption of Mount Tarawera.   A place exists and then doesn’t exist.    For this exhibition I have made some slab-built vessels, moving away from the familiarity of the wheel-thrown form as the sole basis for my work. As I build the work my thoughts are around structures, chambers or tombs - permanent structures housing the impermanent/ the permanent structure erased by the forces of nature/beauty and fragility.    

- Dean Smith, 2017 (from website) 

All Our Yesterdays - Cyrus Tang

Porcelain Makes Permanent That Which Is Emphermeral

11 - 26 November 2016

Nicholas Projects presents

From Clare Flynn's exhibition essay:
Taken as a purely visual display, the pieces that comprise All Our Yesterdays are intricately detailed, haunting reminders of the former life of an object uniquely treasured in the human experience. Beyond the exhibition's visual impact, the tightly knotted world of objects and ideas unfurls through the artist's subject choices and rendering. The pages of the encyclopaedia have been removed from the world of objects and returned the raw material, which - in cyclical fashion = Tang has imbued with her understanding of what happens to objects after their effective presence has faded.
contact: katie.paine@rmit.edu.au

Sarah Ormonde - Water Lines

Sensitive surface treatment in response to the precious rain in a dry land

 

21 September - 8 October 2016

Red Gallery 157 St Georges Rd, North Fitzroy

Even though it has been pissing down this month; water use, it's collection and the effects of climate change on our world and specifically in south-eastern Australia remains a prescient issue.  Ormode's surfaces are so cracklingly dry that I can imagine the smell eucalyptus oil, feel the head and dust and my throat becomes parched. This is a substantial exhibition allowing Ormode to express her visual themes across a range of sculptural forms. I particularly like the bowl vessels and they evoke collection of water and the rain gauge series is visually stunning but could have made use of further story telling evidencing measurement.

Installation view

Rain Gauge Series, porcelain, terracotta.

 Sarah used evocative titles for her vessels such as Soak, Wash,Store, Keep, Collect & Reservoir. 

Water Line Series

River Flow #1 & #2

Movement Makes The Richest Sense When Set Within A Frame of Stillness, drawing on canvas