Ceramics

Tomoko’s minimal pieces radiate a subtle serenity and composure, their design reflecting nature in soft and semi-abstract geologies. Works are uniformly designed through a process of hand-pinching, and receive their stone-like texture by impression — Tomoko taking a rock to the surface in a gentle exfoliation and disruption of the material before airing. ’Silent Existence’ presents an ambiguously figurative form, the depth and definition presented in a distinguished contrast between rough, unglazed exterior surface and an interior void heightened by the use of such a rich glossy black glaze.

Song finds the elegant, and often the uncanny, in his ceramics. Commonly focused on the notion of absence or a biting humour through trompe l’oeil poetry, ‘Silent Witness’ finds the artist in a rarer moment of introspective narrative wit that threaded through his practice in the mid 2000s, the pulp shock of the pulled tongue and skeletal hand balanced with the loving rendering and lyrical balance of colour and composition.

Curled into a neat spiral, Emil Alzamora’s “Sleeping Shark” is not unlike the artist’s other sculptural work, which often shows human forms twisted into impossible contortions. Here, a hammerhead shark’s flat, protruding head is locked into place by its tail fins. Typically seen as threatening creatures with razor-sharp teeth, sharks sleep only briefly and typically maintain movement during periods of rest. Alzamora has emasculated this notoriously predatory animal by representing it in the unnatural state of inert slumber. “Sleeping Shark” is finished in a silvery-blue glaze that makes it gleam like freshly-polished chrome.

Ceramic Inflatable dinosaur with gold luster plug.

The wit & rigor of Spinski’s trompe l’oeil work gives it a particularly compelling vitality, the artist seemingly having been able to alchemise his clay into any material or form. The ‘Small Pail’ is one of a series of works based on the garbage can, the careful, near-perfect reproduction of refuse and container coyly raising the poetic intonation of such an everyday environment, whilst resubmitting notions of value in art to a new and honest order. A mischievous sense of humour (coupled with that natural skill for replication) occasionally landed Spinski in trouble over his lifespan, a similar work to this once purportedly and purposely left out with the overnight trash by the artist — the sanitation worker fighting unsuccessfully to remove the sealed lid until the piece shattered in his hands. Luckily this particular piece has survived intact. Glazed Ceramic sculpture from the Garbage Can series

Peruvian Kukuli Velarde makes work indebted to folk tradition and traditional ornamentation, exploring the new politics of identity, estrangements of context and acts of “forgetfulness” that occur as art is displaced from its origin. ‘Sometimes I Am Kind of Flaky’ is cut from a series of works exploring memory, fear, desire and ideology through figurative icons that, in tandem, present a larger picture of the artists identity and belief in a shared system of traits. The integrity of this particular form appears to be breaking down, its surface indicative of a rough degradation of clay and flaked paint as to an artefact or ancient form unearthed — whilst the palette choice and suggestion of friction radiate a uneasy trauma and sense of inflicted damage. 'ISICHAPUITU series, 1998-2001 glazed earthenware 24 in. (61 cm.) high (5) Sheboygan, Kohler Arts Center, Kukuli Velarde: Cantaros de Vida (The Isichapuitu Series), 2002.

Interior and exterior spaces are primary oppositions that I use in my work both formally and conceptually. Using animal forms as a subjects for my process and vehicles for my content, I am able to address these spaces literally and metaphorically. The animal form allows me to juxtapose other distinct opposites such as life and death, positive and negative. I feel that through this synthesis I am presenting questions and concerns which are not necessarily answered in the work.

MacDowell’s ‘Sparrow’ works to unionise humanities acts with nature, and the destructive feedback loop of results that might ultimately be wreaked upon both. The human skeleton nestled in the hollow of the bird suggests a shared fate and interdependent state, each segment delicately hand built from porcelain and coated with a simple cone 6 glaze to heighten the sense of ghostly beauty and sacred symbolism.

Japanese

Briggs works to capture latent desire and psychosexual stimulation — his porcelain objects a twisted hybrid of sexual reference, attention to detail, focused tactility and overstimulation. The smoothed and polished undulations of this untitled piece are often undeniably, and perhaps revoltingly, flesh-like — semi-recognisable bodily appendages rising then sinking back into the writhing biomorphic whole — whilst others equate to the textures of upholstery or fabric. The artist often incorporates real hair or nail polish to heighten the sense of realism, which perversely serves to make the works more intense and grotesque.

Judy Fox’s highly sexualised sea creatures explore the conception of gender and the rise of body issues from a psychological and sometimes uncomfortable angle, framing and questioning human imperatives as they jostle in context with the Cephalopodic form. A sense of hyper-reality, or real versus a new disarming fantasy, finds itself in Fox’s striking use of gradated colour — the artist building plush hues that seem almost chromatic with a casein paint, layered and masked.

Shaw has referred to himself as the absent arranger, creating pieces that speculate on a presence — whether imagined, real, or auto-biographical — through elegant collisions of objects. The twist is that these assemblages are trompe-l’oeil objects, painstakingly realised through a process of casting in porcelain, glaze highlights and precise overglaze transfer decals. The still life arrangement takes on a poetic rigidity through process, the discarded nature of the objects amassing a larger narrative that reveals deeper habit or obsession.

Early work from Rochefort, before his transition to a heavy use of glaze for messy, gloopy or caustic surfaces. “Stubby the Dwarf” is remarkable in its antithesis to this subsequent approach, the fantastically smooth and monochromatic porcelain expressing familiar fascination with surface at its entirely opposite point, all tactile and fully impenetrable in its cold gleaming resolve. Comparatively, the figurative gesture of the object itself hints more toward a state of collapse — a biological form disintegrating or cleaved into a tumbling mass.

“Sunday” explores presence even in the absence of the human, and the projection of loaded context and themes thrown upon something so inert and everyday as panties in collection — striking tones of auto-eroticism and fetishistic admiration, or obsessive and voyeuristic compilation. Gamble’s small addition of glitter and jewels on the inside of the crotch lining offers up the duality of revealing such intimate proximity, whilst celebrating and revelling in female sexuality. 49 panties - various sizes -