The Journal of Australian Ceramics Vol 50 no 1 April 2011

Perspective
Slippage
Kate Dunn explores the use of ceramics in the design and production of public art
Slippage, according to the dictionary, is the act or instance of slipping, especially movement
away from an original or secure place. For ceramic artists designing works intended to be placed in
the public arena, some immediate considerations come to mind - weight, kiln size, freight and weather
conditions. These factors can steer ceramic artists away from this avenue of practice, however some
innovative artists are using their ceramics skills to make models and components for much larger-scale
works in a variety of materials. This opens up tremendous possibilities for inclusion in architectural
projects and increases the financial sustainability of an artist's practice. Other projects start out as
ceramic works intended for the gallery and transform into large outdoor works through a dramatic shift
in scale and medium.
Two artists who are having great success with this approach are Michael Doolan, an artist from
Victoria who now lectures at Sydney College of the Arts, and Greg Payce, an artist and academic from
Alberta Canada. Both of these artists have developed techniques to overcome the physical limitations
of large-scale public work and yet still retain the integrity of original smaller ceramic works. For them,
ceramics is not only an end product but also a thinking or rethinking tool in the process of creating
large-scale public art. This process may also work in the reverse. Queensland artist Donna Marcus is
making large-scale metal public art with an organisation called Urban Art Projects, then successfully
reduCing the scale back to a gallery friendly ceramic series, which takes on nuances of its own.
To examine these ideas of sliding scale and traversing mediums I spoke to the artists mentioned above
to get a better idea of what is involved in their processes. While ceramic may not be the final material
of some of the outcomes, in the examples discussed here, ceramics is the instigator or stepping stone of
the final product.
Michael Doolan
Michael Doolan works across a number of mediums within a range of scales in the creation of his
cutely sinister, toy-like sculptures. Some are designed for plinth appreciation while others become largescale
public artworks. Regardless of the outcome, the genesis of Doolan's work is hand-formed ceramics.
To make larger scale pieces, Michael has the small ceramic works 3D scanned and then fabricated in
a range of materials such as polystyrene, fiberglass, polyurethane and hybridised vinyl - materials that
eliminate many of the issues that you would immediately encounter were you to make works of the
2-metre plus scale in ceramic. One example of this transformation is seen in his work for now and for
ever. It is a yellow doll made of polystyrene with a hard coat of polyurethane, which stands 2 metres tall
and appeared in the McClelland Sculpture Survey & Award in 2007. This work was based on a scan of
for now and forever (flower girl) (2007), a ceramic work that stands at a demure 29 cm high.
Doolan describes his process of increasing scale as a process of "magnification", rather than simply
'making it large', as with the larger scale the viewer can observe more detail. He takes tremendous care
in the features of the original model knowing that it will be magnified several times. Michael describes
this process as "hyper-crafting " .
'4 THE JOURNAL Of AUSTRALIAN CERAMICS APRIL 20n