The Journal of Australian Ceramics Vol 51 No 1 April 2012

Profile
The Active Life of Objects
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Anne Brennan considers recent work by Patsy Hely
Late in 2011 Patsy Hely made two small groups of hand painted cups and saucers entitled respectively
Island and Lake. When I first saw these works in an exhibition, I was enchanted by the way in which
they seemed to float, little self-contained worlds, on two small shelves on the gallery wall. The simple
cone-shaped cups seemed to drift in their generous saucers, made of green glass or blue powdercoated
aluminium. Little skerricks of land floated in a lake of watery blue on the painted surfaces of the
Island cups. The Lake cups, on the other hand, were painted with a palisade of tree trunks. These were
inverted on their saucers so that their bases (that part of a cup which is usually hidden) were visible,
making it possible to see how the painted surface had been extended over them, to depict a wreath of
scrubby vegetation encircling a patch of blue.
The landscapes depicted in these works seemed to be both generic and specific - the little
boomerangs of land afloat in their watery world could be at once any tiny atoll in the Pacific Ocean,
or one of the artificial islands in Lake Burley Griffin, in Patsy's home town of Canberra. There was
something about this shift between the universal and the particular that induced a sense of reverie
in me. I thought about all the islands and lakes I had visited in my life, and the definitions of them I
had learned in school: an island is a body of land surrounded by water, and a lake is a body of water
surrounded by land. There was something beautifully reciprocal about this relationship of containment,
I mused: the land cups the water, and the water cups land. If vessels are always about the idea of
containment, how appropriate that these cu ps and saucers should mimic this reciprocal embrace.
Some months later, I encountered the work again, this time on Patsy's kitchen bench. Amongst the
cups and saucers we'd used for our morning coffee, Lake and Island seemed to participate in a more
quotidian world, and I began to notice other kinds of things about them. Their handles, for instance:
refined, modified arabesques of slim porcelain, curving round like graceful commas, and joined to
the wall of the cup by a slender buttress of clay. The more I looked at them, the more I saw them as
somehow separate from the bowl of the cup itself. This is not to say that they looked out of place;
rather it was as though the handles were somehow deliberately distinguishing themselves from the body
of the cup, performing in fact an act of punctuation, of separation.
Looking at them made me think of the German an thropologist Georg Simmel's beautiful essay on
the handle. According to Simmel, works of art such as paintings operate differently in the world than
do utilitarian objects. The worlds depicted in an image are self-enclosed, only able to be looked at, he
argues. Utilitarian objects, on the other hand, interact with "everything that surges past or hovers about
[them]." Whilst a painting may be made of tangible materials-such as paint and canvas, the world it
depicts exists outside of, and independent from, the everyday world. The same applies to objects of
aesthetic value, such as vases and cups. However, Simmel argues, "reality also makes claims upon '" an
object that is handled, filled, emptied, proffered and set down here and there." It is in the handle of
a vessel, according to Simmel, that this duality is most clearly expressed. On the one hand, the handle
operates as a kind of bridge between the aesthetic world and that of the everyday. On the other, the
handle must also operate within the idealised realm of the aesthetic.
The handles on the Island and Lake cups are appropriated from commercially-produced porcelain
ware. Because of this, they look familiar. In them we read (perhaps without realising it), the
46 THE JOURNAL OF AUSTRALIAN CERAMICS APRIL 2012