Denise de Cordova, Marice Cumber, Kathy MacCarthy, Rosa Nguyen
14 October – 26 November 2022
FORM & VESSEL explores the use of ceramics in contemporary practice, bringing together four artists who use clay as an integral element in their work. Running concurrently with the major exhibition ‘Strange Clay’ at the Hayward Gallery, the show reveals a range of approaches to material and features clay drawings, a multi-part wall installation, decorated vessels and sculpture.
Fascinating dialogues occur between the different artworks. Marice Cumber’s oversize cups and Denise de Cordova’s female figures originate in the traditional practice of hand coiling, retaining a sense of the ‘pot’ as a receptacle, or container of ideas. Kathy MacCarthy’s sculptural forms obliquely reference vessel shapes but distorted to the point they resemble body parts or the vast masses of mountain ranges. Rosa Nguyen’s exquisite miniature vessels are incorporated as elements in installation work, yet they retain references to their original function when used to hold the husks and stems of flowers long past.
De Cordova, whose work as a sculptor has consistently explored aspects of female identity, began incorporating clay in her practice over ten years ago. Initially using an alter ego ‘Amy Bird’, she has made an ongoing series of ceramic women who have distinct personas and personalities. Serene faced, the figures often incorporate motifs of rocks or sticks. Weighted down, yet made powerful by their burdens the sculptures suggest ambiguous dichotomies. ‘Congregation’, an installation of her ceramics was mounted in the Chapel at Jesus College, Cambridge in 2013.
Cumber’s oversized domestic vessels are openly confessional, inscribed with thoughts and responses to her lived experience. She returned to making ceramics full time after 30 years working in arts education and following a period of severe depression. Exuberantly decorative, her work celebrates the fullness of a creative life whilst addressing the need to have open communication about the stigma of mental ill health.
Kathy MacCarthy’s solo exhibition at Peer, London in 2020 included amongst larger scale mixed media sculptures a number of multi-part ceramic works, whose individual elements were dictated by the size of her kiln. Anthropomorphic, baleful, erotic, hapless, her work in clay is powerful and distinctive. Forms collapse over the edges of plinths, rivulets of glaze rendering their surfaces almost fluid.
Rosa Nguyen combines a range of organic material in site specific installations that speak of the immutable cycles and temporality of nature. Blown glassware shapes and tiny ceramic objects, fired in delicately modulated colours, are placed in relationship and linked with the addition of dried, painted plant stems. With a long-standing interest in Animist and Oriental philosophies her work expresses a deep-rooted spiritual connection with the natural world and was recently featured in the Arnolfini’s exhibition ‘Forest: Wake This Ground.’
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