AGWA Design – Family resemblance

A collection display featuring a range of (largely) ceramic works that showcase the way some of the nation’s and world’s best makers create sequences and clusters of objects. These works explore the idea that hand-making is so often about incremental and subtle shifts in focus and form, as a style and an artistic approach comes into being over time, and from form to form to form. In this mode, we might observe that singular entities in a maker’s output resemble “family groupings”.

The works selected to open this out are incredibly subtle and reserved and can be experienced as a series of the most delicate gestures and expressions of a material poetics that create, even quietly demand, a contemplative space around them. Other material looks at the ways seriality creates the conditions for meditative experience, while others still, are composed of various kinds of parts that speak to formal relationships within individual works whilst foregrounding their inventive (and often oddball) conversations with the larger world of modern and contemporary ceramic practice.

The display includes recent and older acquisitions by makers such as Ron Nagle, Gwyn Hanssen Pigott, Lucie Rie, Hans Coper, Margaret West and Sandra Black amongst many others.

Image credit - Ricky Swallow Fig. 2 2009
jelutong (Dyera costulata), 82 x 38 x 25 cm
State Art Collection, Art Gallery of Western Australia
Purchased through the Art Gallery of Western Australia Foundation: TomorrowFund, 2010