Cynthia Consentino

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.

Fairytales loom in Consentino’s sculpture, the dark and childlike stories emerging through figurative ceramics that play with metaphor and association. the ‘Wolf Rabbit Girl’ diptych trades body parts to create hybrids, the artist exploring and subverting the notions of gender constructed in these stories for children. The figure with the wolfs head suggests some retroactive continuity of popular folk tales, the fusion subsuming stereotype to present confident and playful postures — and discovering the underlying psychological motifs previously hidden. The forms are stoneware, crafted by hand then coloured with oil and glazes.