Armstrong was an artist who aimed to continually puzzle out, provoke and play with the form and definition of clay. Her works range from cow hides, breasts and ceremonial protective aprons to the more traditionally utilitarian objects like vases, plates and bowls, but always with an interest in embracing the imperfections of the medium.
There is an enduring tension between this sense of transfiguration in O’Keeffe’s paintings and the artist’s resistance to any attempt to displace her subjects with metaphor.
Predominantly composed of white earthenware, Dahl’s work pays homage to form and symmetry before anything. A practice in pursuit of the form that is perfect and timeless…
Moe uses concrete to subvert the metaphor of itself. The world of the things we think we know – the seemingly-solid – is memorialised in pieces. The angels are concrete, the concrete is fog.
Ben Orkin’s hand-coiled works are something other than vessels, they are bodies. Breathing bodies, full of air and sensitivity.
The skins and material resonances of porcelain act as entry points into ‘the rest of the world’. The vessel becomes a literal echo-chamber for light and sound, stillness and movement..
…since finding and working with wild, hand-dug clay, Blignaut has been inspired by dreams and textures.
Digression guides Hoffman’s work. She lays out fragments of the familiar, the artefacts of domestic life, setting a table with broken plates overgrown with marine life, placing bouquets in vases gnarled with scales.
Bucktowar uses clay in a way that is close to the body, and close to the ‘wild’ and urban landscapes that she knows. A genuine kind of empathy with the material is communicated
