Material limits: Prue Venables’s ‘impossible’ porcelain and elusive forms
/
The Australian Design Centre’s touring exhibition ‘Living Treasures: Masters of Australian Craft / Prue Venables’ is the ninth in a series of major solo exhibitions celebrating the skill and innovation of significant Australian craftspeople. The exhibition presents a cohesive body of Venables’s recent work, showing both her technical accomplishments in the ceramic medium, and her commitment to pushing its boundaries into new territories.
Venables’s porcelain pieces – in satin blacks, soft whites, bright red, pale yellow and glossy celadon – repeat throughout the exhibition. The solid and satin surface of the glazes are subtle and almost invisible, leaving the focus squarely on the nuances of the porcelain forms. While they frequently reference the domestic and the functional, these objects often defy easy use.
Venables employs the pottery wheel, a process paradoxically associated with symmetry and the cylindrical form, to create her distinctive oval, asymmetrical or oblong works. The process for creating these shapes is revealing. First cutting the circular foot off the thrown porcelain, Venables reattaches the retained vessel walls to a new triangular or oval base. The result is a subtle contradiction: a form that carries with it the qualities of the thrown vessel, yet one that could never have been created by the wheel alone.
Through her sustained practice and careful attention, Venables works with the properties and processes to create works that test the boundaries of what porcelain can support before it collapses, warps or cracks. Arriving at this material limit, Venables also introduces elements in timber and metal, often as handles, to extend her works beyond what is possible with porcelain alone.
Venables’s works reveal a problem-solving mind, strongly influenced by a tradition of craft: moving each of her pieces ever closer towards the materially elusive – impossible to fire, to glaze, to throw, to make. For those familiar with the medium, you are left looking closer, hunting for clues to unravel how the work was made. Sieve (2017), for example, is reminiscent of a sieved ladle, or perhaps a large tea strainer. It is thrown and altered in Limoges porcelain with a handle that gently tapers toward a deep basket filled with precise circular holes. A tiny iron spot near the end of the handle, which would have emerged from the clay body in the firing, is the only blemish on the cool white surface. There is the barest whisper of unglazed porcelain ringing the lip of the sieve where it must have rested in the kiln. The form is perfectly balanced.
None of this is to say, of course, that the exhibition is without flaw. Venables’s body of work, shown in Canberra on uniform display cases, would certainly have benefited from variation in the presentation height to allow the viewer to see inside the shapes or reflect on the symmetry of the forms and the translucency of the porcelains. Yet the abiding sense one gets, in viewing the exhibition, is that Prue Venables understands her medium – both its possibilities and limitations – in a way that few others do.
Saskia Scott, Canberra
Presented by the Australian Design Centre, ‘Living Treasures: Masters of Australian Craft / Prue Venables’ was on display at the Canberra Potters Society, Watson Arts Centre from 13 August until 11 October 2020, before continuing on to Bendigo Art Gallery (31 October 2020 – 7 February 2021) and seven more venues nationally. Saskia Scott is a 2020 Critic-in-Residence at ANCA, Canberra, in a special project partnership with Art Monthly Australasia supported by artsACT.
