On September 22nd 2005, Blender Gallery is proud to present its first exhibition of clay works by three reknowned ceramic artists; Pru Morrison, Petra Svoboda and Kirsty Walker.

Interwoven Tales will illuminate Blender Gallery’s walls with porcelain light boxes simultaneously adorning them with ceramic wall hangings and the floor space will feature quirky vessels and colourful functional ware designed to confront, engage and put a smirk on your face.
Tongue in cheek political satire, explorations of feminism and femininity, personal identity and the identity of ceramics itself are among some of the tales that will be told through this exhibition.

Pru Morrison, Petra Svoboda and Kirsty Walker each bring inspiration from other disciplines to their clay-work, enabling them to push the boundaries of the medium by incorporating art-forms such as printing, fabric design and cartoons in their work. For this trio however, working with clay is not just about exploring the boundaries of their medium – just as important is using clay as a tool to tell their tales.

Brisbane based Pru Morrison juxtaposes domesticity with the outside world making comment on the collisions of everyday life with current social and political debate. Morrison, who has exhibited widely and had her work purchased by the Gold Coast and Stanthorpe collections has been working as a professional artist for the past five years.
Prior to this she completed a BA majoring in photography and travelled the world for more than ten years. The breadth of her experience shows in her work. Her pieces explode with colour and narrative.
The focus for this work being exhibited has been the exploration of the clay surface as a terrain for the application of elements of observation, and social record within the sphere of three dimension.
The three dimensional body embraces firstly a historic reference to function and form and secondly, the effect of bodily movement by passively drawing the viewer around each piece through the use of detail and text. This aids to temporarily alter the mood from viewer to participant.
Some of the pieces are influenced by the idea of identity, or self, which focuses on the notion that your identity is unique to you. Labels such as Strumpet, Pecker Man, Brown Nose are utilized as external dialogue, exploring points of socially constructed perceptions.
These, as the artists says, will show the “stuff that dreams are made of presented daily as scenes of tragic, farcical, comic, operatic, histrionic, spicy and appetizing perceptions reported daily in the vacuum of current affairs.”

A curtain installation made of porcelain tiles threaded together will be a feature of Petra Svoboda’s work at Blender Gallery. Since completing honours in ceramics at the National Art School in 2002, she has become increasingly interested in incorporating printing techniques in her work. In the last 12 months Svoboda has honed-in on mono-printing, layering the clays’ surface with decals and screen printing text and images.
Teaching ceramics is a source of inspiration and energy for Svoboda, “I get really inspired with ideas from teaching. It is also great to be able to pass on the knowledge,” she says.
Inspiration for embellishing her work involves a healthy obsession of hunting and gathering domestic materials.
Originally trained in art history and theory where she developed an interest in feminist issues and popular culture, Svoboda chose to work with clay was because she felt compelled by its associations with domesticity and femininity. Her work revolves around telling the narrative of the history of clay, craft and feminism a story that also resonates personally. Svoboda harnesses the symbolism of the vessel, of domestic items and of fragments of craft history and feminine images, to draw attention to and celebrate the history of craft and of women. Each piece will tell a story that is both personal and public.

Light, space and texture has been an ongoing inspiration for Kirsty Walker, who only relatively recently became seduced by working with porcelain clay bodies.
“I am inspired by what’s around me, nature, pods, flowers, and the simplicity of nature: the sea, shells, impressions left on the sand and rocks, the ebb and flow of the water marks left behind”. In this exhibition, Walker will be exhibiting translucent table lamps, along with delicate porcelain tile light boxes attached to the wall.
Each tile is hand rolled in order to create an uneven surface creating subtle contrasts in the tiles’ translucent quality. She draws inspiration from domestic items such as wallpaper and fabric patterns as diverse as Persian carpets and Indian mandalas, to 1960’s stripes and circles.
Like her favourite artist Rosalie Gasgoigne, she is also inspired by nature. “Like beautiful fabric flowing in the wind, I’m interested in capturing the essence of this kind of movement with clay”, she says.
This new body of work has recently been exhibited in “Impulse” (Ceramic Art Gallery) and “Adore” (Sabbia Gallery) where I was selected alongside 10 other ceramicists from around Australia. The shows were hailed as “innovative and dynamic, undeniably some of the finest ceramic art we have seen within Australia in the last ten years”.

Every picture tells a story. Interwoven tales tells the story of a trio of ceramic artists who are redefining and reinvigorating their medium by challenging its traditional boundaries. In the process, they have created a heady mix of tales and images worth catching.