sabbia gallery

Ceramics, Glass + Fibre

Main Gallery   11 May - 04 June 2011

Simone Fraser – Timelines

Simone Fraser’s dry glazes and forms reference antiquity and the history of the material, but have a strong contemporary validity that conjures up our relationship with the Australian landscape. Textures, patterns and repetition create an almost timeless natural form that is enhanced with strong pigments that cling to the crevices of the forms. A recent edition of slip porcelain on the surface creates an almost shell-like consistency that references nature, with the clay stretched and manipulated into generous and elegant forms. Simone’s work can been seen in major public collections around Australia and is always a delight to behold.

Time is part of the fundamental structure of the universe, a dimension in which events occur in sequence. It can follow a line in both directions, without end, collecting and organising our events and experiences.
The wheel creates a centrifugal form, like a spiralling line, unravelling within and without the centrepoint of a circle, extending unceasingly in a timeline or story. It wraps itself around the form, unfolding its embossed narrative.

This spiralling forges new boundaries, and in its wake leaves a life story of kinks and notches. Each expansion of the line allows for a larger concentric ring to form and give structure to the vessel. It depicts our instinct to hold within the form a connection to tradition and our inner relationship with nature.
As we are forced to join a world of fast communication with little time for deliberation, we equally need to follow the trail of our imagination in the silence of our inner domain. We need to “see”, and renew our inspiration, connecting with our origin in mind, and all the while taking another step outwards.

The melting pot of references in this body of work: from the fossil, the archaeological, the environmental to the contemporary, have melded to produce a personal timeline in clay that still allows individual interpretation. Using the vessel as metaphor, I see my work as a series of communications. It’s also about our senses, our reaction to texture, to colour, tobeauty. Touch is an important aspect of the work – the trace of the human hand the finger mark, the scrape. It’s about a context – a narrative, unfolding through its layers, while still referencing the timelessness of a tradition.

Simone Fraser, 2011