Corvi-Mora visit 4 Nov 2021
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Brief notes on resonant ceramic pieces
Frozen Gesture /Material Trickery / Quiet & Timeless Mini-Monoliths / Lidded Mystery
Sam Bakewell, Julian Stair, Rob Barnard
The motion in these pieces, peculiar quality of parian plus the palette are distinctive and characteristic of Same Bakewell.
Abstraction, colour weight, painterly but not painterly.
Full of an energy — curious, expressive, maybe a little frantic.
Surface contrasts — feeling larger than it is, commanding.
Ceramics on the wall — scale…how big could these go?
They are like a little window, I’m imagining a much larger one, a roof light and so on.
The ‘dust’ is the ‘waste material’ from shaping the geometric form, then it is re-integrated with the work and fired. Parian has high silica making fired dust firm. As for designing into our context, the issues and challenges of waste, both in the world and in the artist studio — trickster-ish use of material to create timely, poetic pieces.
Long admired Stair’s work. Their quiet, non-budging fact of themselves — like death, immovable and present, yet mysterious. The way they meet the support underneath them, a feeling of such solidity & groundedness.
I want to go inside into the darkness within these chambers where it would sound and feel different.
I hadn’t know of Stairs Chicago connection and cannot help as a fellow rust belter, to see the industrial monoliths by the Great Lakes that lay mostly disused are these colours. The monolith quality of these pieces perhaps share something with architecture. And then the lids speak of something transcendent. Lid grace. A contrasting whole.
More lidded mysteries. (Stair & Barnard know each other, have made together, I’m told — on the day I visit they are both in a three man exhibition with sculptor, Robert Burnier).
These lids. These lids. These lids.
Kyoto trained, Barnard seems a master of perfect imperfect. Meditative, mysterious, luminous yet quiet. Stillness, but still very alive and purposeful.
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