Ken is a ceramicist, a painter and a photographer. He is fascinated by the way people interact with each other, absorbed by living their own culture, but not thinking too deeply about it and often unwilling to change. Unhappily, this often translates into a lack of care for themselves, others and the environment.
Estranged Exhibition September/October 2017
Working title: “On a Pacific Street”
A brief encounter with another Pacific culture rarely goes deep enough to unearth the deep-seated estrangements between tribal and demographic groups. But over Ken’s two-and-a-half-year experience as a New Zealand Volunteer with VSA in the Solomon Islands he established trust in relationship with individuals and communities. The heartbeat of a different Pacific culture slowly emerged. To this day there is much that he does not understand but vivid visual memories evoke this present response.
This is what informs this project.
The nine fragile clay forms, represent the nine provinces of the Solomon Islands.
Ken uses gesture to express his emotions and thoughts. Gesture in art, as in life, can be easily misconstrued as playful, flippant, mindless, and irrelevant. But it is the uncontrived and the primal nature of the gesture which appeals to him. Gesture as an art form originally came into use to describe the painting of the abstract expressionist artists such as Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Franz Kline, Robert Motherwell, Hans Hofmann and others.
What do you really see in another Pacific landscape? Ken’s close observations are translated into gestured clay forms and colours. They are fragile and imprinted with wire; inclined to break easily along the place of least resistance.