The Journal of Australian Ceramics Vol 49 No 1 April 2010

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Concerto for Clay and Painting
Kevin Murray reviews Kevin Chin's recent exhibition, Hearth
The more self-forgetful the
listener is, the more deeply is
what he listens to impressed upon
his memory The traces of the
storyteller cling to the story the
way the handprints of the potter
cling to the clay vessel,
Walter Benjamin, 'The Storyteller',
in Illuminations (trans. H. Zohn);
London: Fontana, 1973 (orig. 1936),
p. 91
Tiled, 2009, Southern Ice porcelain, steel and fluorescent lights on gallery
floorboards, h. 10cm, w.48Ocm, d.90cm; photo: courtesy artist
Kevin Chin is not a ceramicist. He
is an artist who works with ceramics,
among other materials.
Chin trained at the Victorian
College of the Arts (VCA), whose
ceramics workshops were abandoned
earlier this century. While largely
unattended by technical staff, their
presence still lingers. About six years
ago, another student strayed into
the empty workshop and started to
create her own punk style ceramics.
Zoe Churchill has gone on to become
what is probably Australia's first clay
dramaturge, including great ceramic
performances in the indigenous
Melbourne Festival production
Ngapatji Ngapatji.
Now Chin, a recent graduate who
also strayed into the workshops of the
VCA, has taken clay into a different
dimension. Chin developed quite a talent in painting. His convincing and poignant canvases would be
enough to constitute his artistic oeuvre, but something has drawn him to the more tactile medium of
clay. It's a strange choice. Clay is messy, wet, difficult to give permanence, and hard to colour. But for
Chin, clay seems to provide a more primordial experience: it connects us back to layers of memory that
precede the visual.
Hearth, the November 2009 exhibition at Linden Gallery, was his latest in a series of strong
exhibitions that have combined the visual image with a tactile medium. A Hole in the Roof (TCB
Gallery, September 2008) fea tured a pile of ceramic leaves, whose brittle material provided a visual
analogue to the rustle under foot. In Ruined (in Kings ARI, June 2009), it was multi-coloured doilies
crocheted by his mother.
For Hearth, Chin located his work in the rear gallery of Linden Centre for Contemporary Art. While a
86 THE IOURNAl OF AUSTRALIAN CERAMICS APRi l 2010