Guy Marshall-Brown

I am interested in what lies between art and craft, sculpture and painting, the utilitarian object and the art object. How can the visual languages of these disciplines be activated and transposed; what is discovered in the nexus between these languages? The various roles that ceramics have maintained throughout history lend themselves to an exploration of these junctures - from the foundation of civilisation to an art material.

Through studying the history of ceramic practice since the Renaissance period, I have been able to identify the positions that ceramics have taken within the material hierarchies, significantly, the key points in time during which that hierarchy has changed. It was within these significant stages when one of the most mysterious and recurrent aspects of modernity, ceramic practice, began to transform the practice of painters and sculptors. This rich terrain has provided me with a platform upon which to base my own practice; exploring the contemporary collapse of material hierarchies. Consequently, I have been producing a body of ceramic work that investigates the junctures between artistic disciplines.

My work frequently manifests itself in hand built sculptures and are often entirely comprised of, or include, a ceramic vessel. Using primitive sculpting techniques, I am aiming to tap into the earthly quality that clay has as the primal substance, the original material; it has a relationship that is relatable to early technology. The crudely constructed pots, which have a direct reference to the traditions of functional craft ceramics, are usually textured and then coated with a white ceramic slip, an act not too dissimilar from that of priming a canvas. It is unsurprising then that I use these vessels as a support for painting, treating glazes and ceramic pigments as paint, exploring the visual languages associated with the notion of painting as object.