The Ceramic Architect

Last week I visited Craft Victoria to view ceramicist Susan Robey’s exhibition Inhabit. Sculpture is one of my favourite artistic disciplines, and ceramics has always been appealing to me as well; both are attractive on a tactile level. At exhibitions I always long to caress their silky surfaces.

She creates, like Dr Frankenstein, tiny creatures that roar with life; that eyeless, blunder about.

In these works Susan Robey, a Melbourne based ceramic artist and architect, combines the structural elements of architecture – walls, columns, windows – with pliable, paper thin slabs of clay. She applies texture: ribs and punctures; repeated patterns like knit and corrugation. She creates, like Dr Frankenstein, tiny creatures that roar with life; that eyeless, blunder about. She says of her work:

”Of the many definitions of ‘animate’, I am particularly interested in ‘to fill with life’ and ‘to make as to create the illusion of motion’. Words such as scuttle, sneak, and perch come to mind, borrowed from the animal and insect world. In addition to support, I believe it is the legs which have enabled the objects to develop individual personalities. In the making order, they are attached last and therefore suddenly the objects appear to be lifted to life.”

Some of those wonky creatures indeed look like cheese graters come to life. I want to pick them up and caress them, take one home with me. These are not critters to fondle however, their folds and sharp edges class them as dangerous creatures of some future, primeval world – waiting to bite your ankle when you get out of bed in the morning.

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Inhabit is showing until 5 March in Gallery 1, at Craft Victoria
31 Flinders Lane, Melbourne 
View the gallery online

Photo by Terence Bogue; via Craft Victoria