VAS HOLOS

VAS HOLOS

Claire Bridge, Jia Jia Chen, Nina Sanadze and Katie Stackhouse explore concepts of wholeness (holos) and the vessel (vas) through rupture and embodiment, translated across sculpture, video and installation. Whether the vessel be of a human/more-than-human body, the earth, body politic or of culture, each contemplates our complex mesh of interrelations as containers of emergent, transformative change.

This project is supported by the City of Melbourne arts grants.

Opening Reception 6- 8 pm, Thurs May 5th

Vas Holos – Essay by Josephine Mead
“To rupture; to remain whole; to pour; to fill; to rebuild; to retain. One of my initial artistic encounters with the vessel was within the studio. The studio; the primary vessel for making.”

ABOUT THE ARTISTS

CLAIRE BRIDGE

Fusing the mythic and grotesque, my visceral sculptural ceramics embody celebratory colour and exuberant excess. In vessel forms akin to cells, soma and ouroboros, I undertake practices of rupture, re-patterning and repair. Drawing on a synthesis of my Indian Assamese and Anglo-European heritages, and informed by tales of Medusa, I re-signify and empower the monstrous feminine. I see myth as a vessel trans-versing porous time, alive with potential to transmit and transform culture. In response to a continuing collective story of violence against women, I invoke repair in the dual aspects of its meaning, as both ‘to mend’ and to ‘come home’.
Holding the vessel as a central idea and image, my work addresses my concern for voice in its varied dimensions, spoken and unspoken. Coming home to the body as a vessel my work evokes somatic voices, along with voices of personal and collective agency, of interspecies, human and more than human relationality, ancestral voices, and the voices of the symbolic. Resisting western tendencies to deny violence and erase scars, my works witness the wounded psyche and soma through visible ruptures and tactile fragmentations. Embedded within my processes, objects, and materials, are gestures of repair of personal and collective wounds, opening ruptures of transformational potential and plasticity. In my practice, repair is a vital practice of cultural resistance, ongoing-ness and restorative futuring.

clairebridgeartist.com
Instagram @clairebridge

JIA JIA CHEN

‘Old, New, Borrowed and Blue’ is an homage to the essential/ornamental role of urban water features through a romantic re-imagining of the Venetian cistern in marriage with ‘Blue & White’ porcelain. This work feeds from a nostalgic desire to merge inherited cultural frameworks; via the assimilation/cross-fertilisation of architectural forms, history and aesthetics. The work references the legacy of Chinese porcelain as the first global luxury commodity; desired, adapted and imitated into every foreign market it entered. It is also a re-creation of the classical courtyards of Roman and Chinese civilizations, which both shaped and reflected their philosophical and organizational principles.
My set-piece is composed through a dialogue of material fragments drawn from physical absorption and manifestation of place, and an allegorical exchange between Marco Polo’s travelogue’s that introduced China to the West, and Italo Calvino’s poetic literary inversion in ‘Invisible Cities’.

Jia Jia Chen is a ceramic artist interested in the feedback transmission of her Eastern and Western contexts through the re-interpretation of ‘White Gold’ and its complex history of economic and cultural exchange. Exploring how objects transform into vessels for metaphorical projection, locating devices and holding places.

jiajiajichen.com
Instagram @jiajiajichen

NINA SANADZE

Filmed and exhibited on the verge of the upcoming Federal election in Australia, this work is broadly conceived against the background of environmental, political and demographic crises in the world in the 21st century. Bringing fear and despair into the realm of visual poetry and beauty, we are invited to contemplate our own fragility and the feeling of finality of civilisation. The humble cardboard election booth becomes a sculptural form and a symbol of hope, choice and change. ‘Re-election Day [Water]’ is the second part of the ‘Re-election Day’ series. The first work, titled ‘Re-election Day [Fire]’, was exhibited in March 2020.

“Nina Sanadze is compelled to respond to some of the great forces of our time – ideology, authority, monuments, conflict and survival – amidst the transient yet insistent fabric of memory, beauty and tenderness. Evocative and dramatic, Nina eschews the once victorious into a tumbling morphic vortex of fragility. Nina possesses a powerful ability to draw on the political, the familial and the poetic with great clarity and aesthetic poignancy.” said Rhana Devenport (ONZM), director of the Art Gallery of South Australia.

ninasanadze.com
Instagram @nina_sanadze

KATIE STACKHOUSE

I am driven to make work using the materials of bronze and beeswax due to the transformative properties and elemental vitality that these materials hold. Some of these sculptures are made to be physically activated by either an action or performance and I work towards creating a relational dynamic that reflects the ways that ecologies move in and out of synchronicity and balance due to forces that are human and non-human. Functioning like bodies, the sculptural vessel is a container to conjure, protect, nurture and grow whilst the portal forms function as thresholds. My research investigates the way that sound, and body performance can interact with sculptural objects to activate the tensions between the materiality and ephemerality within a work. Throughout my practice, I consider materialist philosophies and the intersections between pedagogies of ecological stewardship, politics of care, feminism(s) and theories of place. The politics in my artworks are poetic in form and express concerns of care for place, communities, and ecologies. The sculptures became imbued and activated through methods of production, voice and performance.

katiestackhouse.com
Instagram @katie__stackhouse