Reconciliation
Where Isaac Newton, along with many Renaissance scientists, spent countless hours attempting to turn base elements into elusive precious metals with no success, the modern ceramicist has the power to do this, through an understanding of essential periodic table components, meticulous firing procedures, and a tenacity to evaluate and build on successes and failures. This work is an alchemic reaction to empirical, conceptual, and design processes, combined with evidence that reconciling disparate concepts can be the subject of an artwork in itself.
This series of vessels make oblique reference to elements of the natural world and abstracted themes of industrialised infrastructure, simultaneously.
In-glaze lusterware had a prominent heyday a century ago, within the Art Nouveaux and Art Deco movements. The intervening years have seen a marked divergence between utilitarian and aesthetically functional ceramics. Through a juxtaposition of textured matte underglaze surface and cobalt lustre finish, as well as smooth surfaces and ridged, banded surface articulation and decoration, this work interrogates all these polarised dichotomies. Yet at the same time, it also embodies a reconciliation of disparate elements, although diametrically opposed, each can be seen as underpinning (and complementing) each other’s existence and veracity.
Kevin trades under the title of Magnus Fish Ceramics.
