Jacqueline Spedding, Transcend - detail, 2014. Photography by Ona Janzen. Copyright of the artist.
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Environmentally integrated art-making
"A few of the most effective pieces are not immediately prepossessing but gain power the longer you look at them, raising questions about the relationship between man-made and natural. In Jacqueline Spedding’s winning entry Transcend, a large cluster of white flowerpots hangs in a state of discolouration and decay from the sinewy branches of a tree vine and spreads onto the ground below. At first glance the effect is slightly jarring: an impression of tacky intrusion. But pause a little longer to examine these distressed production-line objects—each actually an individual ceramic piece crafted by Spedding—and an uneasy meditation on the fragile barrier between the domestic and the wild arises." |
Jacqueline Spedding, Green Dreams – detail. 2013. Ceramic, oxide, organic material, charcoal, bricks. Photography by silversalt. Copyright of the artist.
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Making Ground: Blue Mountains as Material
My work from the Making Ground: Blue Mountains as Material exhibition at the Blue Mountains City Art Gallery in August 2013 was reviewed by Caterina Leone for the Australian Ceramics Association blog. You can read Caterina’s review in full here.
"Jacqueline Spedding’s Green Dreams, (image above) installed in its own corner of the gallery, confronts the viewer on one side with an almost post-apocalyptic vision of old, broken bricks and strange, semi-decayed garden pots. These mysterious objects are formed by dipping weeds and domestic plants into clay slip, pressing them into moulds of common garden pots, and firing them. The organic matter burns out, punctuating the clay with their loss, at once absent and present. They speak of memory, its formation and its loss, as well as the relationship of humans to nature. Spedding’s work touches upon an aspect of this relationship that is, interestingly, one which ceramicists are already familiar with. Working with clay makes evident the power of the material itself, how it maintains a degree of authority over its own use. The use of natural materials in Making Ground similarly exists under this condition; nature may be reorchestrated, but it cannot be fully tamed or mastered; it still dictates and places limits on how it can be used. As such, Spedding’s work highlights the folly of our perceived authority over nature, and the reality of our place in, rather than above or separate from, the natural world." |
Cascade Studio’s Artists, 2013. Photography by Camille Walsh for The Cloudscape.
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Cascade Artists' Studio
In 2013, Cascade Artists’ Studio featured in local design blog, The Cloudscape. You can read the full article here.
"When the Blue Mountains City Council revitalised the Lawson Industrial Estate a few years ago, professional artists were probably not high on their list of future tenants. Creative industries though have a historically strong presence in our region, so perhaps the fact that a few prominent Blue Mountains-based artists are starting to inhabit the Industrial Estate, is just a natural progression." |
