Ceramics

Consentino pulls from stranger, deeper narrative elements for ‘Hana Hana’, exploring sensibilities psychologically thrust upon the female in narrative context. As “Hana" loosely translates to “flower” across a wide continuum of western and eastern language, here the female form rests and transforms into its namesake — the artist playing to the typification of the flower as a symbol of gender, fragility and sexuality in a strange hybridity of plant and girl.

ceramic 9"h x 16"w x11"d Provenance: Richard S. Barnes Gallery, London, England.

Zimmerman’s abstract crushed and annexed distortions find context in the presence of the artist’s larger oeuvre, commonly consisting of tableaus of violent or orgiastic movement in figural multiplicity — often similar in complexity and a recognisable humanising and moralising tone to that found in the work of Hieronymous Bosch. This pair of sculptures breaks recognisable identity down to become informal and semi-representative male or female shape, the ceramic — roughly coated in a caustic glaze and cracked in firing — is only truly suggestive of a great stress impressed upon it.

Shaner’s use of earthenware examines material origin, the artist meditating and focusing on the geological foundations under which the substance exists, so as to recall nature in each of his non-representative sculptural acts. The “Hanging Landscape” is a series of simple spheroid clay forms, each segment quietly and elegantly resolved then strung up and suspended sequentially. However, through acts of reference — as well as delicate use of relationship in terms of colours and textures found in startling and intelligently utilised natural processes — a notion of the land is poetically built almost like the sedimentary layers of earth itself. Hanging landscape, Big Fork, MT, 1994 Glazed and incised stoneware, steel cable Chop mark to several pieces 65" x 5 1/2" Provenance: Purchased from the artist.

Daisuke’s long, narrow-necked ceramics relate to and are influenced by the traditional pot, the artist choosing to throw on the potter’s wheel as a way to capture the sense of fluid movement and control that defines the ceramicist’s practice — and ascertain a relationship between the modes of art and container. The flute-like body of ‘Hazakai no Katachi’ (‘Receptacle of Boundary’) mirrors the delicate orchid, translating the flower to a symmetrical idolisation in pure white clay.

Transformation

Man (Collection of Souls)

Cavener’s dramatic and often cartoonish anthropomorphic sculptures seek to provoke as often as convey a message, and embed psychological profiles through subtle or overt narrative means. ‘Hoof’ explores a more direct application of the principle — the larger representation of the animal literally reduced to its footprint, shaped carefully by hand from ceramic and hollowed out to become a vessel. The act is a little reminiscent of the trophies and objects collected and created by game hunters, a concept returned to frequently by Cavener in exploring human behaviour. The practicality and utility of the object only adds the possibility for further culpability.

I like Iguana

Earl’s hand-built ceramics concentrate on descriptive scenario, utilising landscape or building as an environment for laying out a storyline. Often focused on a recurring character named “Bill” and a likeness of rural Americana, Earl juxtaposes scenes with the romance and highly wrought fantasy of rococo porcelain, balancing folkiness with a sensual grandeur in a manner that often seems faintly surreal. The three-dimensional complexity of this work is typical

Sealing 4400 names of American Air Forces that have died in the Iraq war on its surface, Lane’s ceramic acts as beautiful memorial and symbolic vessel as container. The piece captures a representation of the moment in time and the accrued sense of loss and grief as a single resolved entity, the microscopic text and pattern built through quantity giving a stark indication of scales involved, the artist simultaneously honouring the fallen and exploring how art might still accomplish that memorialising in a contemporary society. 22 x 6 x 6 inches Porcelain Vases are the finest in Ceramic Art. In this series, the beauty of glazed porcelain is the backdrop for casualty lists and images relevant to these memorials.

Cavener’s dramatic and often cartoonish anthropomorphic sculptures seek to provoke as often as convey a message, and embed psychological profiles through subtle or overt narrative means.

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. ‘Isichapuiti’ 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. This piece is particularly exposed, the filigree found etched into the ceramic of other figures in this series having been left out in favour of a simple, smooth dark skin. The strange reduction and decentralisation of the female form is only recognisable by its sexual interface and coded use of flowers, the otherwise raw clay punctured with fresh stigmata pick out in a vivid, glossy red that speaks of silent pain & suffering.

Through his anthology of techniques and processes, Nasisse harnesses, exposes and extends texture naturally planted within his clay. His figural depiction, or “mythic images”, provide a canvas for meditations upon the human condition and a narrative that remains automatic, the clay allowed to find a form spontaneously in an infrastructure of chance event and reoccurring pattern. ‘Jar’ retains Nasisse’s signature figurative expression, the character as recognisably his as a cartoonist’s might be. A female form finds its sexuality defined and viewers’ eyes drawn in by such a spare use of color. The cracked skin, strange shell-like hat or lid, and gnarled coral form of a second, more complete form suggesting sea or lizard-like incrustation.