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ARTHOUSE GALLERY
Rushcutters Bay, NSW
27th July - 12th August 2023
The Vessel and the River
Artist Statement
Kate Dorrough
The vessel, is a container for collection and enclosure. A holder of space, its shape expressing a fluidity of form.
The River, is liquid held by land.
This exhibition is in homage to the power and ecological significance of the River, and of water, the giver of life with its cyclical potential for both renewal and destruction.
These large scale hand built coiled vessels and paintings summon a monumental and symbolic essence of the river. The ceramics echo the forms of antiquity, its surface invoking an ancient in-signature of calligraphic mark making. The paintings referring to the historical and contemporary landscape traditions. These works have evolved intuitively, unrestricted and at the same time inspired by such conventions to emerge as individual felt iconic representations of the liquidity, fortitude and the ecology of the river.
My art practice for over several decades has explored the theme of the River, where sculptural hand built ceramics are presented in direct relationship to large acrylic paintings on linen. It is a conversation between paint and clay. This interrelationship and mutual exchange has produced an enriched sensitivity to mark making, surface and texture culminating in an ever expanding visual dialogue.
The ceramic vessels made from the land in the form of stoneware clay are formed slowly over time, with the rhythmic quality of coiling, drying, glazing and firing. In both the processes of ceramics as in painting, time for reflection is needed to enable the works to breathe and become their own entities. With an unorthodox approach to the ceramic surface as a painting, numerous layers of calligraphic painterly marks and glaze are created with numerous kiln firings. Iron oxide within the clay bleeds through the glazed surface creating an alchemic fusion of mark making on a surface in the round. The full and curved forms resonate as figurative bodies. At times suggesting a pregnant belly, being outward expression of inner possibilities.
The paintings evolve with a multiple layering of thin washes and stains in conjunction with thick impasto marks, which contrast to controlled and the accidental dripping of paint. They are an embodiment of the river, where gesture is captured, held still, to become heraldic emblems or enigmatic river effigies. Calligraphic marks float or are embedded within the paint surface, they resonate as text or a series of musical notes implying a language to be understood or deciphered. The works acknowledges a need to understand the river in order to work with and preserve such fragile ecosystems.
The exhibition conceived as an installation is an immersion within a watery river landscape. The works presented both on the wall and as sculptural objects for me are suggestive of actors on a stage, the paintings as theatrical setting reflecting differing moods within the gallery space. The exhibition is a culmination of lived and felt experiences, living by the river, artist residencies and childhood memories of swimming in country NSW. The body is both suspended within the river and unified as a whole.
Essay
Naomi Lee McCarthy
Creation, destruction, and renewal in the work of Kate Dorrough
Dorrough’s body of work is an invitation to float suspended within the landscape - like silt in a river. A sensation that draws its embodied inspiration from the artist's memories of swimming in creeks on family holidays during her formative years. Floating in a natural body of water alters our relationship to our surroundings, as we look upwards, trees appear taller and more ethereal, skies seem preternaturally blue against shimmering, pink, sandstone forms. Whilst one is floating, one’s body becomes alert to tiny shifts in the atmosphere, one feels connected to something deeper, older, and more mysterious. The experience of floating is intuition made real, reminding us we are not separate from that which surrounds us. Each of Dorrough's artworks becomes a testament to our intimate connection with the earth, reminding us of the eternal rhythmic pulse of creation, destruction, and renewal, and the exquisite beauty and vulnerability inherent in every stage.
Infusing her work with a personal lexicon of symbolic motifs, that at times resemble trees, serpents, humans, and at other times read as abstract notations alluding to hidden meanings. Dorrough’s leitmotifs are informed by musical scores, by her own drawings often initially created in the landscape and then abstracted in the studio to become an evocative language she carries across her paintings and on to her clay vessels, where the calligraphic traces of the artists hand appear like a rhythmic pulse. Her pots are contemporary iterations of classical, utilitarian vessels, inspired by her time working on an archaeological dig in Greece where Dorrough fell in love with the ancient, monumental forms of Etruscan pottery.
The tangible nature of paint and clay play a crucial role in Dorrough's exploration of creation and destruction. Her textured passages created with a palette knife, and the interplay between transparent and opaque washes of paint create a sense of space and time in her works, resembling the geological processes that shape our surroundings. Her painterly process emulates the gradual accumulation and erasure of earth over time, like the way a riverbed carves its path - a path continuously shaped by the impacts of metrological events such as storms, droughts, and floods. This body of work is both beautiful and portentous, reflecting the complexities of our relationship with the earth and the legacies we leave behind.
Kate Dorrough’s artworks evoke an expansive, arcane, geological, connection to the land we inhabit, a land operating as an archaeological vessel holding past events within its body of mud and water. A land haunted by vast and indelible memories of what went before. Whilst Dorrough’s marks are conduits for the artist's personal memories, they carry traces of the collective unconscious, Jung’s concept that memories surpass the limitation of the individual and are common to humanity and carried in the inherited structure of the brain. Dorrough invites us to contemplate the ephemeral nature of existence and the interplay between memory, perception, and ever-changing landscapes that not only shape all our lives, but on which all our lives depend.
Article
JOURNAL OF AUSTRALIAN CERAMICS
Community & Conversations
Vol 62 No 2, July 2023, p 122 - 123
By Kate Dorrough
Sydney, Gadigal Country, New South Wales
‘THE PAINTERLY APPROACH’
Coming to ceramics from a painting background, exhibiting my paintings since 1996 within a commercial gallery context, ceramics have offered a sought expansion, reinvigoration and depth to my art practice. Allowing for further explorations of materiality, with the direct physicality of clay, using your hands to create an object, combined with the plasticity of glaze application as with acrylic paint. Ceramics have lead to a greater sensitivity of the textual surface. With the additional alchemic quality of the kiln and the unexpected, patience and fortitude have all fed back into my painting process. Attracted to the potential to extend the painterly mark onto a three dimensional form, I approach the ceramic vessel as a sculptural object, with its painterly surface in the round, exhibiting these in direct relationship to my large acrylic painting on linen.
This is not a new idea, being inspired and influenced by an array examples of the painter as ceramicist, alongside a wealth of historical examples of the ceramists and the painterly mark, including an intensional reciprocality with the medium of painting, such as Betty Woodman and Peter Voulkos.
Initially I experimented and exhibited utilitarian earthenware ceramics painted with underglaze paints and lustres, expanding to slip cast bowls inverting their functionality with pierced holes and stitching, to earthenware hand built Staffordshire inspired figurines. Alongside this, studying with Barbara Campbell Allen. Her generous guidance set me on my own path, finally arriving at hand built coiled BRT stoneware vessels, with numerous layers of glaze, slips and stains combined with numerous firings. Consciously and unconventionally perceiving the ceramic surface as a paintings. This approach has inadvertently become so hot right now! With current trends to liberate the ceramic object pushing it beyond technical limitations, expectations and contexts. Ceramic as both sculpture, installation and as experiential collaboration holds and challenges it’s place within art contemporary discourse.
For me, it was important I made my own ceramic forms which relate and embody the painted surface. Consciously invoking the historical calligraphic mark alongside an intuitive, abstract and contemporary painterly application.
Unrestricted by conventions and in homage to them, I enjoy the experimental with its ever expanding visual dialogue. I see the ceramics as actors on a stage, the paintings, invoking a theatrical stage setting. Lately extending this
conversation with paint and clay to include projected videos further expanding the potential of ceramics within an installation context igniting the gallery or curated space.
‘The Vessel and the River’, Art House Gallery, 27th July - 12th August 2023
‘Heather + Kate Dorrough : Lineage’, Manly Art Gallery & Museum, 1st Sept - 8th October, 2023, touring to Manning Art Gallery 1st Feb - 17th March, Tamworth Regional Gallery, 13th April - 16th of June, Ararat Regional Art Gallery, 29th June - 13th of October 2024
Cementa Festival, 19th - 22nd September 2024
