Play Time

Bogard’s androgynous ceramics explore sexuality in loose, lucid figurative and iconographic profiles. Utilising symbols that convey a regulatory ‘feminine’ quality — flowers, young animals, soft curving lines — the works unshackle themselves from stereotype through an act of reclamation. ‘Play Time’ scores an act of love in a reflexive, vaguely unsettling model, the disposition of the insects at odds with the distinctly human interplay of body in embrace and choice of furniture. The artist attempts to alter “rules of engagement” with her sculpture, stripping away assumptions of gender with the typically amorphous or asexual insect.