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MOULDING MEMORY

JANET FIELDHOUSE’S CERAMIC ART

Sally Butler
Eyeline 83
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“The mark is the way the hand created the forms, the memory is the idea created”

Janet Fieldhouse, 2014

 

Sometimes the medium is the message. Janet Fieldhouse (b. 1971) works in ceramics and her use of a medium called flexible porcelain provides a very tidy metaphor for ideas about moulding memory in her art. Flexible porcelain has an organic binding matrix, which is added to standard ceramic raw materials, giving a greater pliability prior to firing and increasing the medium’s tolerance for creative manipulation. Where Salvador Dalí and Joan Miró introduced us to the soft edges of memory in surrealist painting, Fieldhouse does this in ceramics. Her forms seem to be in a state of free-fall and semi-collapse, and create illusions of levitation — heavy clay objects appear caught in the act of floating upwards, defying gravity and their material conditions. Some of the surrealist bifurcation is at work here too — objects turn into their ‘other’ as we look at them — clay becomes flesh, porcelain becomes organic fibre. Whilst an aesthetic affinity with surrealism is evident, Fieldhouse is concerned with a vastly different concept of memory than that of the early modernists’ exploration of the subconscious. Her work engages with cultural memory — a more collective memory — and how her contemporary Torres Strait Islander (TSI) community creates relationships with a cultural heritage regenerating from the siege of colonisation. What does it mean to identify with a cultural memory that retains few tangible assets? How does one turn an inherited memory into practice? These are the intriguing questions underpinning contemporary TSI art and, as Fieldhouse’s foregoing comment signals, this is a very complex and progressive intellectual endeavour... The rest of this article is available to subscribers of Eyeline

Janet Fieldhouse, Arm Bands Series 2, 2014 (5 pieces). Porcelain, 14 x 20 x 15cm. Image courtesy Fany Saumure and Vivien Anderson Gallery, Melbourne.

Janet Fieldhouse, Arm Bands Series 2, 2014 (5 pieces). Porcelain, 14 x 20 x 15cm. Image courtesy Fany Saumure and Vivien Anderson Gallery, Melbourne. 

Janet Fieldhouse, Bride Pendant Series 4, 2014. White raku, shells, string, cassowary feathers, beads, 55 x 32cm. Image courtesy Fany Saumure and Vivien Anderson Gallery, Melbourne. 

Janet Fieldhouse, Bride Pendant Series 4, 2014. White raku, shells, string, cassowary feathers, beads, 55 x 32cm. Image courtesy Fany Saumure and Vivien Anderson Gallery, Melbourne.