Chisel marks in stone, buttery brushstrokes on linen or luminous wire threads in lighting: Sally Dan-Cuthbert has established a platform in her gallery for artists who work with ceramics, glass, design, furniture and lighting. She believes that, “Collectors are looking for connoisseurship, are wanting to see skilled craftsmanship, the recognition that artists have gone through a whole lot of mistakes to get to a final point of making a beautiful object.” Cuthbert represents leading Australian ceramicist Prue Venables, who represented Australia in the prestigious Loewe Foundation Craft Award (2023) held at the Noguchi Museum, New York. The Loewe Foundation judges noted of her porcelain forms, “… a beautiful study in space and movement, the porcelain’s yielding flexibility daringly manipulated with skill and precision to create a gently twisting shape with opposing triangular geometry… harmonious, elegant and surprising… gradually shifting perceptions as the original form vanishes, the vessel becomes a testament to the power of process to absorb exploration, enquiry and risk, culminating in something unflinchingly new.” Venables said, “I make very risky things. The porcelain that I use really wants to collapse… the handmade in art has never left, but there has been an explosion of interest in ceramics, knitting and natural dyeing. Perhaps it is due to COVID, where people were locked up and are now wanting something tactile, something connected.” “Slowness, for me”, said Venables, “offers room for imagination to play, the contemplation of space and movement, enquiry and risk, the absorption of the processes into muscle memory, the unconscious empathic perception of materials and a potential to freely compose subtle changes of expression.” The finished pieces are sublimely beautiful objects, the artist’s hand almost imperceptibly visible. Her exhibition, poetically titled Ma: The space between raindrops; a breath between musical notes, is at Gallery Sally Dan-Cuthbert from October to December. By contrast, Sam Gold, a ceramicist based on Kaurna Yarta/Adelaide Plains, South Australia, reveals the residue of finger marks in pinch-style coiled sculptures and vessels. They are clunky, gorgeously tactile ceramics whose poetic language connects with audiences in spirited explorations of the interrelation of body, material and memory through a framework of queer ecologies and the politics of touch. The result, Gold informs us, “… unfolds at the intersection of ecological enquiry and somatic philosophy, positioning ceramics as a tactile record of bodily encounters where forms hold memory and where body and surface.
