“To make clay mountains seems paradoxical, yet it seems to be an old idea. Ceramic green glazed wine coolers and honey glazed containers with lids formed like mountains were made during the Han dynasty in China around the 1st century AD. Geologists of the old school made clay analogues of earth movements.
Intrigued to explore the painterly theme of ‘landscape with figures,’ I chose mountain sculptures as my vehicle.
I commissioned Lino Alvarez at La Paloma pottery at Hill End to throw my prototype designs on his pottery wheel. The contours of a clay membrane compressed and drawn by the potter’s hands create a paradox of mound and void where space speaks to volume. My memory became present to material process as simple, hollow clay forms were cut, folded, compressed, inscribed into clouds, rocks, plants, pathways, figures.
Black and white Gold Rush photographs by Beaufoy Merlin in the Hill End Museum inspired the figure of a woman in Victorian dress. Wearing a large sun hat, she clutches a bag of gold and carries a small harp. An ordinary chook has escaped from its pen. Further along the mountain terrain, a personage in a lunar head dress rides side saddle on a donkey. I believe she derives from a small terracotta figurine that I saw on a visit to in the Louvre in Paris.
One imagines that a viewer could bend perceptions of time, space and scale as they cast their gaze over this
sculpture.” — Toni Warburton (
@toniwarburtonartist )
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Summer Show | 13 February - 14 March
ARTISTS: Tim Bass, Kate Briscoe, Keroshin Govender, Patsy Hely, Jan Howlin, Hendrik Kolenberg, Chung Miok, Sassy Park, Jenny Pollak, David Pottinger, Alun Rhys Jones, Tania Rollond, Evan Salmon, Aaron Scythe, Toni Warburton, Park Yeontae, Kim Yikyung
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Toni Warburton, Archaic Beings Wander Here, 2004, 37 x 24.5 x 28 cm. Photos by:
@docqment 
