Top image - Kiss Bowls Bottom image- Flower Vase with peaches and bats, after Matisse
“My aim is to reconcile extremes and oppositions, destroy hierarchies and confuse conventions. Contradictions are built-in, embraced, and essential.”
so says Paul Mathieu, Canadian artist and craft guerilla.
Afternoon Sun Garniture (After C. Cavafy)
Mathieu has spent his career poking fun at conventions of aesthetics, art,craft and any other conventions that come within his focus. The author of several books including "Sex Pots: Eroticism in Ceramics", Mathieu uses the ceramic medium to question the hegemony surrounding the visual arts.
He says:
“But if ignorance, prejudice and discrimination are slowly disappearing from our understanding of sexuality, this is not the case yet for ceramics. The prevalent hegemony of the image and the dominant discourses and attitudes in art circles, in academia and in art institutions, where the focus tends to be on the eye over the hand (touch being an unbreakable taboo in art experience), make that difficult if not impossible. Ceramics, it often seems, is quite simply an invisible practice, that does not even deserve consideration.” Sex Pots: Eroticism in Ceramics, New Brunswick, New Jersey, Rutgers University Press; London, A&C Black Publishers, 2003, p. 9.
Paul Mathieu is a keynote speaker at the Australian Ceramics Triennale, the date of his talk is to be advised
No comments:
Post a Comment