‘WISHFUL THINKING’ – MILLY DENT
12 – 23 February 2020
EXHIBITION LAUNCH
Wednesday 12th February, 6-8pm
We are thrilled to welcome ceramic artist Milly Dent back to Saint Cloche with an ambitious new body of work from a period of time working in China recently. Milly took part in many workshops with local craftsmen in Jingdezhen (where porcelain originates) from which she took elements of new skills learnt and integrated them into the ‘Wishful Thinking’ body of work. This body of work was crafted using various techniques and technologies specific to the ‘Jingdezhen’ skillset.
When in Jingdezhen, Milly made a number of visits to the abandoned Jingtao Factories in Jingdezhen where she came across a landscape of floors lined with porcelain fragments, degrading moulds and models, unfinished works. Over the 20 years in which the factory had been abandoned, nature had started reclaiming the building; plant-life had grown through floors and walls, creating an intersection between nature and man-made, temporality and permanency.
“For my latest body of work, I’ve used porcelain to highlight temporality and beauty in the linear progression of things changing. My intention – to pay homage to the power of tactility and texture, and complex matrixes found in nature.
I developed a series made from degrading plaster forms found in the abandoned factory, of which the natural elements had shaped the once round bottle into a 3 sided, crumbling plaster block.
I then developed a series of forms which are somewhat zoomorphic, visually alluring yet possibly tactilely repellant. I’ve intended that the works give off a dynamic sense of something taking shape with subtle shifts in surface finish, from raw unglazed porcelain to a full spectrum of traditional Chinese Celadon gloss glazes, resulting, in a collection of coral, growth-like creatures.”
CATALOGUE
Click to view Catalogue & Price List (6 Mb PDF)
Photography by Jacqui Turk
Wishful Thinking Exhibition