‘Down to Earth’, as I have titled this exhibition, is as much a statement of intent as a theme.
Recent dramatic events around my home at Cherryville have brought certain aspects of my environment into very sharp focus.
Fire and all that goes with it exposes the raw fundamentals of the natural world and while some things end, you see others begin. Things that you were oblivious to now become powerfully apparent. What you felt you knew is swept away and replaced by the stark and unfamiliar, as if a curtain has suddenly been drawn back.
So to tell this story I have set about re-formulating the materials that I have developed and been working with for a very long time. The forms are the result of a fierce paring down to enhance the clarity of the message; scale and simplicity are important too, in the quest for structural elegance. By much trial and error I have adapted the glazes to give me the palette needed to both express and entice.
Like everything in ceramics the work has history and one cannot help a look over the shoulder at how others have approached this process, sometimes hundreds of years ago.
Powerful ideas survive and there are some resolutions of form and surface that will endure, especially if they touch upon and resonate with our emotional connections to the natural world.
Jeff Mincham AM
Cherryville, March 2015
