Vase Visage
Ivan Vostinar
Opening: August 28 5:30 pm
Viewing: August 28 until September 7
A melange of sculptural vases synthesising practicality, aesthetics and originality.
For me, a solo show should always have a new direction, style, content or concept to what one has done before. It’s given that work in a solo show should be recent, but I believe an artist should go further by challenging them-self to venture into unknown territory. Hopefully the outcome is both successful and surprising to people already familiar with one’s work. Ideally every solo show should be like a new chapter as opposed to another paragraph or page.
Having expressed my high ideal for a solo show, it seems foolish to choose the topic of a vase – an applied art object that has been made millions of times. An object that virtually all symmetrical variations in form have been explored and now is only open to decorative variations thus rendering it almost useless as an art subject.
The above holds true for symmetrical vase forms however by simply deciding to make asymmetrical forms one immediately heads up a far less travelled road and is hopefully closer to art than applied art. That was the challenge for me with this topic, to make something unique and fresh based on the age-old vase.
For solo shows with ceramic work I usually try and make a new glaze or two, but for this body of work I tried something different, one glaze on top of another. This can create effects and lushness that are not possible with a single glaze. It too requires much testing as not all combinations are attractive nor do some work at all.
The vases are made from sculptural clay, a coarse stoneware clay and glaze fired to 1200 degrees.
{Gallery 1}
