Strathnairn Arts Anita McIntyre
Ceramics Residency & Exhibition Award 2019

Annie Parnell

Annie Parnell is an emerging visual artist based in Canberra. Having graduated from her Bachelor of Visual Arts (Ceramics) in 2019, her work explores the potential of a feminist visual language in with ceramic materials through deviation from traditional processes.

Artist Statement:

I choose to actively deviate from traditional processes of ceramic materials to experiment with new systems of building form. Traditional ceramics practice favours skill, control and the expected outcome over chance, however, when chance is involved as an element of the making process interesting results can and do arise.

By randomly applying thick glaze to delicate porcelain forms, heat catalyses an interaction where porcelain structures obstruct and/or are warped by glaze flow. The resulting forms are evidence of and reliant on these unplanned chance based transformations.

Post firing, actions of glaze that oozed and dripped over smooth clay surfaces, are stopped in motion, evoking in the viewer feelings of embodiment and abjection. In feminist theory, the abject is that which threatens subjectivity as it has traversed bodily boundaries.

The abject is embodied by glaze, which, mobilised by the firing process, threatens the structures it encounters. Here material deviation comes to represent a feminist interrogation of the patriarchal ceramics traditions.