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Sleek black porcelain pieces were pleasingly arranged at Yufuku Gallery in Minami-Aoyama, Tokyo (see photos at right).
Andrea Barker, an Australian ceramic artist and award winner at Nyon's International Porcelain Competition, creates non-functional porcelain objects. She chose to work in porcelain not for its traditional qualities of white and translucency, but for its sensuality and fluidity. So surprised were most people who visited upon seeing black porcelain they asked, "Is this really porcelain?" The shiny black is achieved through a smoking process in saggers inside the kiln. Indeed, they almost look like metal. Some pieces are jet black while others have a silvery tone. In her exhibition concept, Andrea describes that her work "is not so much a question of putting in, as one of taking out; not so much of adding as of subtracting; the use of black as metaphor for emptiness." It's no wonder I felt a sense of quietness and stillness the moment I stepped into the gallery.
One might find Zen in her work. Spaces around and between the pieces are very important for her and she finds significance in empty spaces. Part of her concept of space is found in a sentence of Tanizaki Jun'ichiro from "In Praise of Shadows:"
"Silence prepares the ear for sound, just as darkness increases sensitivity to light."
She says she loves Japan for its extremeness. Japan, especially Tokyo, is one of the noisiest places on the earth with loud music from speakers all over the city on top of shopkeepers shouting sales slogans here and there. Yet at the same time, there is a subliminal understanding of the importance of quietness, emptiness, and rusticity, so much part of Japanese beauty.
This was Barker's second trip to Japan. The first was in the spring of 2002 after she had won the Grand Prix at Nyon. There were some visitors to the Yufuku exhibition who had also seen her winning work at Nyon, also a grouping of black porcelain pieces. They said the individual pieces shown at Yufuku were similar to those that won the Nyon award. However, at the Nyon exhibit, a greater number of her works were displayed in a smaller space. At the Yufuku exhibit, she had more space, and was thus able to create a display with more room between and around each piece -- thus the ambiance of her work changed significantly. That spatial influence might have come from her first trip to Japan.
Other more important influences on her work are ancient materials and cultures. She's traveled to the Middle East, Southern Europe, and North Africa to observe the ceramic culture of ancient civilizations, and even worked as an assistant photographer of antiquities. "It is an amazing experience to hold a 3000-year-old pottery shard in your hands and imagine the culture, the civilization that created it, the person who owned it, and to imagine its purpose in the everyday life of the people of the time," she said. Not surprisingly, she gained much inspiration from those travels and experiences. Yet, one might also find a strong contemporary mentality in her work too. Andrea told me that she tries to extend the limits of what the material can offer. Some say that masterly pieces never become outdated. For instance, take a porcelain vase or jar from Ming Dynasty China. The form and quality are almost unequaled to any contemporary artwork. When the ancient material porcelain met Andrea's sensibility, it combined to create timeless beauty.
The basic shape is created as a gesture, very quickly and spontaneously in clay, she said. A lot of curving into the basic shape follows. At every stage of curving, she sands and polishes. During the process, especially at the very end, two-thirds of the pieces break. At Yufuku gallery, I heard many people telling Andrea that they would like to see more of her work in Japan in the future. I'm sure as she matures as an artist, the more spendid her work will become. Even now she is an artist who knows how to filter experiences through her sensitivities, and how to accept and apply the influence on her work.
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