Narelle White

Small sculpture in a blend of Australian porcelain and marine sands.

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Embedded with beach sands, these tiny protagonists are coarse and golden from numerous firings to stabilise their salty bodies.

Their playful shapes are an amalgam of geologic and human references; lively fossils from a chimeric world...

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Installation photo: Lou Miller

Artwork photo: Narelle White

~Created for Speculative Materialism, Craft & Design Festival Canberra

Hand-pressed in an experimental blend of harvested marine sands and porcelain, these ceramic sculptures speak to a spirited relationship between people and place.

Their poetic effects are amplified by an unlikely ceramic phenomenon… these kiln-fired sculptures are eroding!

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In this durational artwork, the artist brings fresh eyes to a field of creative labour that is commonly pre-occupied with the immutable object.

Through a process of de-sedimentation, our attention is returned to the raw materials which underpin ceramic production.

The ceramic object becomes a transitional site of process and transformation – where poetic effects arise from the improbable and unfamiliar.

Here, we are invited to reimagine our relationship with age-old materials and their origins.

Sculptures in porcelain, granular and combustible aggregates, glaze

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Future Choice Director’s Award, 2022

Finalist | Victorian Craft Awards, 2022

Finalist | Muswellbrook Art Prize, 2022

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Affectionate Creatures are an alluring amalgam of biomorphic and geologic references. Their porous walls are breathable; a sense of movement is distilled in each creaturely contour. Their subtle, textural palette is derived from an artist’s blend of granular aggregates in porcelain – so that their substance is imbued with an experimental quality.

I like to think of them as visitors whose dynamism invites us to see ourselves in the material stuff of this world - and who propose an ethic of recognition and empathy. Placed together as a ‘herd’ or ‘mingle’ , they become lively, relational entities who speak of curiosity and care.

Finalist | McClelland National Small Sculpture Awards 2020

Finalist | Wyndham Contemporary Art Prize 2020

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Small ceramic sculpture in porcelain, beach sands and glaze

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Tiny Wonders are made of Den Haag beach sands embedded in porcelain, and hand-pressed into emergent, organic forms.

Indelibly imbued with the mineral properties of their origins, Tiny Wonders were created in residence at the European Ceramic Workcentre (EKWC) in Oisterwijk.

Their bodily folds recall the fecundity of carved fertility fetishes like the Venus of Willendhorf, and speak to a spirited relationship between people and place.

Much like nomadic art, they are made small (so as to travel close to the body) and of the earth - while also embodying an appreciation for intimate works which may be held in the hand.

With their animistic qualities optimised, they suggest small but lively protagonists in imagined narratives of growth and formation.

Learn more about this EKWC residency here.

Images by the artist

Sculptures in porcelain with pink sands.

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Moon-grubs (a juvenile form of invertebrate, amphibious gastropod) are rarely (if ever) found outside one’s imagination.

Their common name is derived from the subtle luminescence of their exterior, and from their medley of crescent-shaped folds.

Best observed in the shade, the self-content quality of their round, upturned faces is said to reflect the blissful effects of moon bathing. Such a gentle, biophilic disposition makes them excellent company for humans.

Perched in the gallery upon glass and stone, their faces draw upwards or towards each other: self-content artefacts in a long chain of chance and discovery...

Photo: Lou Miller

Keepers (2023). Ceramic studies, glass sheet, hebel bricks

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They are the keepers of origin stories: an amassment of experimental clay studies that bubble, compress, melt stretch and sparkle. Seemingly excavated, unearthed or brought to light, they are the relics of sustained material enquiry and (bound to spawn new works) they hold the promise of creations to come. As we encounter this floor work, we apprehend it’s geological origins - our bodies lean over and our eyes draw close to survey and wonder.

Installation photo: Lou Miller

(STUDIES IN QUIET DISSOLUTION)

Self-eroding ceramics (porcelain with beach sands), digital photographs on rag paper, custom shelf. 2023

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A curious performance is afoot in the gallery, where a suite of tiny ceramic sculptures are self-eroding...

Nearby, photographic studies recall the works as they emerged from the kiln.

Once seemingly stable entities, these sculptures are slowly disclosing a more transitional nature, as their porous bodies draw moisture from the gallery air.

This process of erosion is enacted by the beach sands in the clay-body, with their residual salt and soft calcite particles.

Here, the ceramic artifact becomes a transitional site of process and transformation… and the image becomes the artifact.

Installation photo: Lou Miller

Porcelain, plaster, pine-needles, aluminium foil, lentils, sugar, wood-shavings, shells, ball clay, ash, stains and glaze.

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[di-ghust] verb

to taste with relish; to savour

de•gust is a sensory degustation of ceramic experimentation.

Here, the happenstance of castoffs and the poetry of ‘intentional scraps’ are preserved in a durational study of unlikely ceramic artefacts - bringing fresh eyes to a field of creative labour that is commonly pre-coccupied with the immutable object.

That which is routinely discarded is preserved and refined in deference to its distinctive materiality.

While hinting at the patterns of consumption and desire which underpin so much ceramic production, de•gust disrupts the teleology of an object-oriented ethos (make, bisque, glaze, fire = object) and troubles a hierarchy of value in which the permanent is prized over the perishable.

Artwork photo: Francoise Schneider

Installation photo: Jeremy Phi Nguyen

Sculptural vessels in porcelain, sand, combustible aggregates and glaze.

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With fecund bodies and bulbous feet, these vessels are like geological matter sprung to life.

Created with an experimental blend of Australian porcelain, combustible organic aggregates and Victorian beach sands, their material profiles are distinctively raw and delicate; imbued with the peculiar mineral properties of their origins.

Their porous walls query the time-honoured notion of containment – so often embodied in ceramic vessels – to instead suggest breathable membranes.

Photography with Shang-Lien Yang

Investigations in ceramic sculpture: Porcelain, sand, wire, combustible aggregates and glaze

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Provisional Assemblies explore themes of material agency and organic growth in a collection of sculptural works that feature the artist’s experimental clay bodies - and which emphasise their porous and textural qualities.

Photo: Janelle Low

Digital photography.

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How Cavernous is inspired by archival images of Jim Melchert’s 1972 signature performance Changes.

This performance - in which Melchert and fellow artists sat motionless while drenched in liquid clay - was captured by Dutch photographer and friend Mieke Hill.

In Hill’s images, we see the changing viscocity of the clay as it dripped, pooled and cracked from the body of each performer-turned-subject or maker-turned-made.

Recalling this work, Melchert has said “The experience was not unlike a meditation... you realise how cavernous your interior is.”

Today, How Cavernous invokes the legacy of Changes in the context of contemporary image making and clay work, as Narelle embarks on a performative dialogue with friends (who are themselves ceramic artists) and a camera lens.

In doing so, she considers the visual tropes we deploy to photograph ceramic art, while foregrounding the camera’s affinity with the empathic qualities of clay.

Invited to dip themselves and engage their bodies as they pleased, each subject shaped the language and composition of each image, to explore interiority and embodiment (vessel and body) and to query the relationship between the maker and the made.

Small ceramic sculpture in porcelain, beach sands and glaze

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Playfully animistic and fecund, Sandpeoples wilfully collapse animate and inanimate.

Their granular, flecked bodies are an experimental blend of porcelain slip and Rhode Island beach sands - fired to resemble well-weathered stones.

Indelibly imbued with their place of making, and sometimes recalling fertility carvings and totems, these scupltural works are spirited figures; both people and place.

Photo: Françoise Schneiders

Sculptural investigations in porcelain, sand and glaze

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PLUMES is a body of sculptural investigations, commenced at The European Ceramic Workcentre.

Learn more about this residency here.

To create these plumes, I created four experimental clay-bodies of granular aggregates in porcelain.

For one of these blends, I gathered samples of sand from the beaches of Den Haag - a city that was once my home. By embedding this matter in my clay, I created works which, like me, are indelibly imbued with this place.

In deference to the material’s peculiarities (ie: low plasticity and high granularity) an alternative building method was devised, wherein tiny forms were 3-d scanned and digitally enlarged. Larger press-moulds were milled, into which a granular clay-blend could be compressed.

Robust and alluring forms, PLUMES suggest an amalgam of geological and biomorphic references. A sense of movement is distilled in the muscular contours and in each compelling glaze.

Fired to resemble well-worn stone, they reflect my keen interest in material intelligence, organic growth and the co-constitutive dynamics of people and place.

Images by the artist

Ceramic sculpture. Rhode Island beach sands in porcelain.

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as yet (rock pools) is a meditation on the ways in which we alter, and are altered by, place.

Its evocative forms were created at the Rhode Island School of Design by blending porcelain slip with found sands of Narragansett Beach.

Remade in the kiln, the fragments of as yet continue to imply a shifting field of material relationships, and to rethink the parameters of ceramic sculpture.

It’s unique materiality is imbued with the peculiar mineral properties of it’s origins, and reiterates my belief that material and personal transformations are intertwined.

Photo: Françoise Schneiders

Fusing geologic and biomorphic qualities in organic and oftentimes creaturely works...

Glistening with salt and imbued with an unique materiality, these rust drawings are presented as an unbound artist’s book.

Through alchemy, each drawing has determined it’s own edges, which the artist has carefully preserved.

When handled, the book’s intentional and sculptural silhouette will loosen and shift as the pages turn...

Photos: Janelle Low