Clear glazed porcelain; slip cast and assembled

As a child I recall going on road trips with my family to small towns in country Victoria. Sometimes these trips were for the purpose of visiting distant relatives on farms; other times simply to spend time together away from familiar territory; to leave the suburbs of Melbourne; to breathe. I recall visiting dusty junk shops filled with antiques and unfamiliar, redundant farming paraphernalia. My most significant recollections are the country museums and strange little shops filled with curiosities that we occasionally visited. These curiosities seemed peculiar to country life; strange mutated specimens like two headed snakes, lizards and farm animals; foetuses pickled in bottles; animals stuffed or stripped of their flesh and mounted. I found these places both fascinating and disturbing. This strangeness with its connection and familiarity with death was something that I rarely encountered in my suburban existence.

To pay homage to these recollections I created a body of work exploring these beautifully strange encounters. Collecting bones from country farming properties and, through the processes of moulding and slip casting, transforming them into pure, fine porcelain replicas, glossy and devoid of their gruesome recent past. Assembled into hybrid objects they become functional or sculptural oddities and play with common perceptions of domestic life and contemporary object design.

 

Tags: ceramics, curio, family, farming, found objects