Ideas in Hand

Allyson Adeney, Canbora Bayraktar, Cybele Cox, Jan Guy, Aedan Harris, Allegra Holmes, Raymond Huynh, You Meng-shu, Luke Ryan O'Connor, Yasmin Smith, Maro Sugimoto, Amy Teng

Curatorial Statement

By Jan Guy

When LNL's gallerist, Jin Lee, invited me to curate a sculptural ceramics exhibition for her, I was excited but hesitant. As an art educator, I have crossed paths with many committed, talented and sometimes brilliant artists completely enamoured with the medium of clay. I have included twelve artists in this exhibition from those just starting their explorations to those already recognised on a national and global stage. I could have easily assembled another three or four exhibitions of a similar calibre and number, but time and space have not permitted. Perhaps, one day, I will get the chance.

The immediacy and chameleonic nature of clay allow the artist to fluently express an innumerable range of personal and worldly ideas of representational and abstract tones.  The contemporary artist working with sculptural ceramics can take a speedy or slow approach, but their ability to convey their intended ideas is bound to an accumulative, intimate knowledge of their material - a willingness to listen to the medium, to take note of what it physically will and will not do with their hands, and learn from the cultural and social histories marked in its substance by those who came before them.

These qualities are evident in varying ways throughout the ceramic works shown here in Ideas in Hand: contemporary sculptural ceramics. While the artists Yasmin Smith, Aedan Harris and Raymond Huynh alert us to the enduring, unbiased beauty of nature and an awareness of the toxicity we place upon it through our oft, thankless attitudes towards it, Canbora Bakyatar, You Meng-Shu and Maro Sugimoto give wry and astute commentary of the Everyday and Popular culture through personal reflection. Ally Adeney, Luke O'Connor and I excavate the internal, procedural histories of craft's forms to merge the traces of human endeavour with our emotional and mnemonic relationship with the present cultural moment. Cybele Cox, Allegra Holmes and Amy Teng give a contemporary voice to our marginalised histories, directing us towards a cultural revaluation of sexual and spiritual aspects of the human condition.

As our AI future rushes towards us with all its uncertainty and potential to transform what it means to be human, it seems, to me, that our sentience will only continue to thrive in the creative act. It will be in our visceral agency, in art, in our ability to gather up wet earth in our hands and give thought physical shape with all its errors, inconsistencies and virtuosities that will sustain us.