CONTEMPORARY CERAMICS

The Australian Embassy presents "A Secret History of Blue and White", an exhibition of contemporary ceramics at the Gallery of Arts and Design, Silpakorn University. It runs from Mon-Sat from 10am-6pm between Feb 9 and March 3.

The show highlights the diversity and strength of Australian ceramics and positions it within European and Asian ceramic histories. The works on display were created by Robin Best, Stephen Benwell, Bronwyn Kemp, Vipoo Srivilasa and Gerry Wedd.

Each artist moves beyond the historical understandings of blue and white. By exploring personal ways to make blue cobalt "speak", they add new layers of expression and narration to the already complex story of blue and white.

The snuff bottles Robin Best created illustrate her interest in the cultural, commercial and political history of China and its relations with the West. The pieces have designs taken from countries historically associated with trade on the routes that blue and white porcelain passed through on its way from China to Europe via India and the Middle East.

The precise patterning of the surfaces, often drawn with a sharp cobalt pencil, are carefully hand worked over the polished porcelain surface like an indigo tattoo.

Stephen Benwell incorporates portraits and figures in his works to invoke comparison with bronzes, vases and sculptures of classical antiquity. They are freely modelled, loosely finished and fired with little or no glaze.

Memories of the Australian bush can also be found in his tubular vases, which evoke the not-quite-vertical trunks of gum trees, their uneven bark and irregular branches. The painterly qualities of the surfaces of the pots is a contemporary and personal abstraction, arising directly from Benwell's interest in antique Chinese landscape scrolls, with layers of suggestive mists, dappled clouds, shadowy figures, landscape forms and sky.

Reflecting a knowledge and respect for pottery traditions, many of Bronwyn Kemp's blue and white porcelain decorations feature motifs derived from bush flora.

Her use of distinctive banksia plant forms and grevillea flowers alongside freely composed patterning in her bowls show how she combines both to make the exotic, and how antique sources of her inspiration give birth to something that is recognisably Australian, contemporary and personal.

Vipoo, a Melbourne-based Thai artist, showcases his lai krarm porcelain as a representation of ancient cross-continental communication, providing eloquent testimony to international cultural exchanges from the past to the present.

For him, the manner in which this Chinese style of porcelain migrated from Asia to Europe parallels the cultural exchange between himself, as a Thai artist, and Australia, his adoptive home.

For Gerry Wedd, the blue and white is epitomised by the famous willow pattern and his recent works have increasingly conjectured new events and metaphorical narratives within the traditional pattern.

In this exhibition, he took elements of willow pattern and turned them into 3D objects, pulling them out of the original frame of their fixed narrative. These objects take on the characteristics of figurines or knick-knacks, while offering opportunities for new and more complex readings.

The opening ceremony of "A Secret History of Blue and White" is on Feb 8 at 6pm. Prior to that, Robert Reason, Curator of European and Australian Decorative Arts at the Art Gallery of South Australia, will give a talk on the exhibition and update on what is current in Australian ceramics at the Faculty of Decorative Arts at 4:30pm. Gerry, a representative artist, will also be present.

Admission to the exhibition and talk is free of charge. For more information, contact Australian Embassy on 02-344-6462 or Silpakorn University on 02-221-5874

Bangkok Post
Friday February 02, 2007