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 ROM
THE FOUNDATION OF MODERN DESIGN, natural forms have provided an antidote to
industrial banalities and the loss of craft traditions. The notion of
nature, in one guise or another, still plays a role in the work of most
ceramic artists. Rather than invest they shamelessly borrow decorative
designs and vessel shapes from flora and fauna. This need not be a bad
thing. Even after a century and a half nature remains prolific. Yet
natural form can be reduced to a convenient cliché in a second.
 It is no easy
matter to invent new forms, even to renew the old ones, yet it is
unavoidable. The creation of shapes whose absolute, undeniable presence
sings out to eye remains the primary task for ceramics as an art form.
To achieve this, finesse, patina, surface, glazes, all must take second
place to the ability to make objects with an aura so resilient that they
stand out anywhere, not just in the glamorous sterility of the show
case. They must, at least, rival the roses that will some day be placed
next to them.
So many
artists have abandoned the struggle between form and finesse entirely in
favour of finesse. For them, especially natural form has become little
more than an excuse to manifest an overwhelming technical competence. In
the process, which is their process, nature expires parodied and
smothered, living their works lifeless, with little appeal to the senses.
As a
ceramicist, Angela Mellor's greatest achievement is the rigorous
maintenance of her good relations with nature. In setting out to rival
the presence of natural forms with her own work, she has made nature a
congenial collaborator, ever ready to prompt and renew creative tension.
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She has borrowed from natural forms, but her great passion is for the
landscape and the processes which shape it and lend it form, folded
rocks and crystalline light which could never provide a single template.
It is the tide tossed textures of coral, driftwood, shells and stones
found on the beach which attract her. Each caresses and modulates the
light in different ways, clotting , condensing and trapping it in memory
of its own, slow shapeshifting by wind and weather.
Glacial Light,
the name of one series of Mellor's bowls, sums up her ambitions to rival
such artefacts of nature, a work glowing with the presence of rocks and
shells in shards of ice tumbled, slowly through rock for millennia.
Like other works these pieces catch light in their thin shells so that
it leaks infinitely slowly from an irregular fragile lip. The crumbling
circlet of fragile indentations just below the top edge of each bowl
emphasises this crisp, solid luminosity, so that it seems to have been
trapped there forever. The unique presence of the Glacial Light series
is not finessed from some flower or shell. It is established directly
between the peerless white china, pure light and the passage of time.
This
brilliance was not achieved without considerable research and
reflection, first in her undergraduate studies at the University of
Tasmania and recently in her Masters degree at Monash University, Melbourne
(1998-1999). Mellor began with an idea of light as substance and of a
material so translucent that once shaped it would seem to hover forever
on the edge of time, a second before the end of the world.
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