Singing The Body Electric: Narratives in Ceramic and Print
Curated by Kristine Michael
Date: 3rd Dec. 2022 - 4th Jan., 2023
Stories can give you a fundamental truth about life, contain archetypal symbols that help make us conscious of and curious about our origins and destiny and they capture a society's truths. Create a shared history, linking people over time. Stories are not merely chronicles of what happened; they are more about meanings and often healing. As people talk about the past in a subjective and embellished way, the past is continually reconstructed. Our stories live in us forever. Visualizing a story so that others might see fragments of themselves is how artists and writers use figurative language to create imagery, a strong mental picture or sensation that goes beyond the literal meaning of image/words to communicate. The exhibition strives to re-introduce the narrative power of ceramics and printmaking through the works of artists who have gone beyond material and technique in their practice in order to communicate and reclaim repositories of stories, experiences and memories. They offer a potent alternative to the current state of alienation through object and mark making that reunite humanity’s past, present and future seamlessly.
Ceramic and printmaking is a discrete set of stories within the historiography of decoration and the creative narrative language. The rejection of ornament at the turn of the century by Adolf Loos dictated by the ideological environment around modernism introduced a dominant reductive trend in all genres. Ceramics and printmaking were both cast as vehicles of profound ornament and narrative imagery within the hierarchy of early 20 th century visual culture. The decorative denoted the superfluous, the unessential, yet the surface itself is scored, carved, marked, incised, modeled and constructed into a system of signs where every mark is essential in its reading of the object and its story.
The storyteller is deep inside every one of us. The storyteller is always with us, for it is our imaginations which shape us, keep us, re-create us when we are torn, hurt, even destroyed. It is the story teller, the dream maker, the myth maker that is our phoenix, that represents us at our best and at our most creative.
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