Artist Interview

Marker's Commentary

This evocative painting series represents a cultural collision of east and west yet is reflective and brooding while demonstrating deep concentration of a more personal nature. Chinese bowls and broken crockery featuring the culturally distinctive blue repeat motifs and patterned bands have been married with pensive portraits in unlikely and surreal juxtaposition. Across the series of paintings, cobalt blue tones dominate with wisps of sensitive pink hue, barely highlighting sections of crockery, water bubbles and facial features of a young woman. These portraits, featuring heads and faces alone, are depicted submerged in a tank of water, emerging from the Chinese bowls themselves or lying on a bed, gazing wistfully beyond the picture space. Collectively they evoke a story of cultural dispossession, personal troubles or repression. Particularly poignant in the painting of heads and bowls is the dichotomy between the quiet gaze of the face looking up and that of the head with eyes closed, as if in deep reflection, grief or sleep. There is great beauty in the depiction of shards of broken crockery and in the portrait painting. The skill in modelling form is extended with conviction to the painted reflections on the polished bench top and the delicacy in depicting glass in the water tank. The painted imagery is supported with the inclusion of actual ceramic shards, which themselves may have been featured on the painting of bowls with faces. While alluding to the rich history of Chinese porcelain and pottery found in archaeological digs and middens, the implied violence of this breakage, in association with the soft tonal skin, heightens a sense of unease. We also ponder the life of a young woman suffering bouts of despair and how her experience represents the experience of so many others. In all its forms, reflection plays an important and symbolic role in this beautiful body of work.