EARTHED – Clay Charcoal Ochre https://www.facebook.com/thefoundryartsspace/
The story, colour and texture of Country
Exhibition of Ceramics & Paintings by
Angie Russi & Eric Brown
15 July to 13 August 10am – 4pm daily
(closed Tuesdays)
Angie’s love of birds and use of winged creatures as muse and metaphor coupled with an ongoing love of porcelain, has inspired her to re-explore the beautiful qualities of this medium in making a new body of work for her latest exhibition in 2023.
Developing new works for the exhibition, Earthed- clay, charcoal, ochre, has allowed Angie to explore and exploit the qualities of whiteness, translucency, and fineness of Porcelain clay. Her subject matter is always inspired by the natural world and an investigative curiosity that seeks to reveal something of the sacred within the mundane.
Growing up in country Victoria surrounded by the ebb and flow of life in the wetlands on the family farm fascinated Angie as a child observing the evolution of ‘things’ and the continuum of life in the rich soup of the freshwater swamp. This formative experience which was not only experienced as a physical observation but felt deeply by her is emotionally ingrained in Angie’s outlook on life and underpins her work. Repeatedly using imagery and character of ‘the bird’ Angie experiences these creatures as inhabiting the space between earth and the heavens and feels that perhaps it is that the lightness of the wing allows her mind to soar.
The process of inspired expression through kinesthetic making rather than an academic development of ideas is important to Angie and she prefers to approach her subject intuitively by allowing the alchemy of the mind/body creative process to unfold naturally over time. Angie brings collections of sketchbook drawings, photographs, written word, and a lifetime of observations together around a feeling that may have sat with her over several months and sometimes years, waiting for a moment of coalescence. In bringing feeling and physical material together, in a dance – a play of hide and seek, she is waiting and watching for the expression of the feeling to make itself physically apparent through her hands as she manipulates the clay. Knowing her material allows Angie to work in this way, much like an archaeologist of the multidimensional mind, however, there is no digging involved but much waiting, experimenting, and observing of her own impulses and in this process, allowing what’s under the surface to float up and reveal itself in physical form.
Angie’s most recent porcelain sculptures can be seen through many prisms but have drawn much inspiration from the processes of transmutation and metamorphosis observed in the natural world where physical matter is never lost but is in a perpetual state of change. In her sculptural representations of cycles of birth, death, and re-birth, Angie may also be interrogating, through metaphor, her own rebirth as an artist, returning to full-time studio practice after two decades of putting her own artistic expression on hold and stepping into the business and analytic world of arts management. Observing and experiencing the atrophy and decay of matter in the world around us and in our own life experiences can be uncomfortable and perceived as ugly causing us to avert our gaze. However, there is no renewal without destruction, and in her new body of work, Angie attempts to reveal the existence of beauty and deeper meaning in bearing witness to the processes of transfiguration.
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