SYDNEY.- Sullivan+Strumpf Sydney is currently presenting the latest body of work from one of Australia’s most respected ceramic artists, Adelaide-based Kirsten Coelho. Long fascinated by the significance of objects as interlocutors of social history and material culture, this new body of work continues Coelho’s exploration of the intersection of domestic use and historical context — how objects can embody both the practicality of everyday life and the rich narratives of the past.
For her exhibition title Coelho has merged the German words haus and leider, which translate into English, as “house songs”. Leider were written for performance in domestic spaces with solo voice and piano; Coelho finding their reductive format imbued with the power “to speak to emotive experiences within the intimate spaces of the home”.
This notion of the reductive is something Coelho wishes to develop in her own work and with this in mind, she has brought together vessels in smaller, considered groupings that sit atop hand-crafted shelves to accentuate intimate vignettes of objects as a reflection of the home.
In these trios and pairs of objects she delves into yet another layer of the nostalgia and reverie associated with the domestic and kept objects. By placing unexpected or incongruent pieces next to each other, she enables the objects to tell one story as separate items and a wholly new narrative when shown together, to create the insignificant and significant stories of our histories.
Taking cues from two seventeenth century paintings, Francisco De Zurbarán Still Life with Four Objects (1635) and Juan van der Hamen Léon’s Still life with Porcelain and Sweets (1627), Coelho has also, for the first time, incorporated terracotta clay to her practice through a series of works.
“This clay,” Coelho comments, “is associated with the everyday and the rudimentary, and in so many ways is the very opposite to the refined connotations of porcelain, yet in these new works it acts as a counter point”.
“Terracotta holds the same pull for me that porcelain does. The clay in its basic form is so compelling, rich in its depth of visual tone and trace of long histories, that has also seen this material elevated (for example in seventeenth century European redware), to one of elegance and refinement.”
Kirsten Coelho works in porcelain creating functional forms and vessels of otherworldly perfection that fuse the formal with the abstract. Her work has been influenced by the history of objects – jugs, flasks, bowls, beakers – echoes of the pleasures of daily life that she reiterates in inviolate meditations on the history, purity and order of daily rituals and routines.
Her work has been exhibited widely both in Australia and internationally and is represented in numerous institutional collections including the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra; Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney; Art Gallery of Western Australia, Perth; Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide; Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane; Chatsworth House, UK; and the Boymans Van Beuningen Stichting Museum, The Netherlands.
Coelho’s porcelain vessels are unadorned, modest, and deceptively simple… imbued with multiple references to the waxing and waning of clay and humanity’s fortune… fusing past and present, rarefied, and mundane. – Yvonne Wang, 2023
Sullivan+Strumpf, Sydney
Kirsten Coelho: Hauslieder
July 27th, 2023 - August 12th, 2023
