The Journal of Australian Ceramics Vol 50 no 1 April 2011

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Far left leo Neuhofer
Visceral Tab leau 1. hand-built
using coils, underglaze
h.2&m w.22cm. d.& m
Left: Philip Hart
Inlaid Bowl. wheel-thrown
inlaid decoration
h.3Ocm w.3Ocm
Photos: Michal Kluvanek
of softly altered cup forms, likewise evoked country, this time far more specifically with the earth ochres
from a particular location.
The broad flow of landscape and the implication of a pilgrim-like movement across its unfolding
horizons was bravely tackled by Angela Walford in Journey, a series of wall-mounted raku tiles.
Jane Burbidge also ruminated on nature; her Low Tide offered a set of porcelain bowls that
implied the wash of a receding tide had left them stained and stranded on a small ripple of sandbank.
Burbidge is no stranger to utilising strange glazes and weird arcane oxides to evoke comfortably familiar
natural surfaces and textures; in this case, pale sulphate sta ins on the rims mimicking the retreat and
encrustation of a salt tide.
For anyone looking closely, the small slip cast Alga Bowls by Maria Chatzinikolaki revealed decorative
organic tropes in the form of lyrical trails of wonderfully flowing and convoluted passement decoration.
Not an easy feat on these delicate undulating forms, and worlds apart from the metallic, process-derived
crystal matrix on Jennifer Denton's richly scintillating, if rather classically stolid, Crystalline Vase.
Perhaps it was left to both Stephanie James-Manttan and Leo Neuhofer to offer the last words on the
organic and the cellular.
James-Manttan's Impressed Vessel deservedly received the award's Art Gallery of South Australia
Acquisition Prize and thereby gained entry into the Art Gallery's collection. A simple yet complex work, it
at once married ideas of folding and softness and resilient. hard form. It spoke of structure, wobble and
collapse, of woven basketry and cellular coralline growth.
Neuhofer's coiled work Visceral Tableau 1 was far more difficult: a small undulating rectangular
curtain of fleshy form suggesting internal organs, the kind of thing you hope you do not have to see.
The insides of an animal? Perhaps one of ourselves? (Life and identity get blurred at the deep visceral
leveL) Displayed as if by an Haruspex, ganglion and intestinal forms that might have been taken from a
satisfyingly livid lithograph in an Edwardian medical home-instruction handbook - at once a direct quote
and an oblique statement. Neuhofer, a previous winner of the award, is always one to watch.
Stephen Bowers is an Adelaide-based visual artist. An exhibition of his ceramics will be held at
the Robin Gibson Gallery in Sydney, October 2011.
THE JOURNAL OF AUSTRALIAN CERAMICS APRIL 2011 65