The Work

To find meaning in the act of making, and to make objects that mean something, are two of the many challenges facing contemporary ceramic artists. Objects engage with both lived and imaginative experiences of the world; they are potentially functional, decorative, symbolic and metaphoric. Objects may tell stories. They may invite us to reflect on the passage of time, and the moments of its unfolding.

Imagine yourself, on a Saturday morning, walking with a crowd through Floriade, Canberra’s annual flower festival marking the return of spring. While the flowers are individually beautiful, their aggregation into narratively themed beds, complete with designated photographic sites, is too artificially manipulated to suggest meditation on the mysteries of nature.

But your persistence in continuing through the park on the path established by the floral designers is suddenly, and unexpectedly, rewarded. There are few people so far from the entrance, and the park has become quieter. You reach a pond (a cool respite on the warm morning) and see on its surface, tantalisingly out of reach, a mysterious vessel shimmering in the sunlight. It is artist Catherine Reid’s installation, Raft. Deep within the unlikely location of a popular flower show, Reid has created a moment of poetry.

Raft is an enigmatic structure, a glass vessel apparently pausing in mid-voyage from the pond shore to some unrevealed destination. Its delicate skeletal frame, some six and a half metres long and fabricated from lengths of lashed-together glass tubes, supports and contains more than 120 subtly coloured ceramic forms. These irregularly spherical elements, each 15 to 20 centimetres in diameter, suggest large pebbles of exotic gemstones, or perhaps the eggs of some unknown creature, suspended in a lucid casing. The transparent vessel appears to vanish and reappear as shifting light alternately glances off and through its crystalline structure. Its reflection is dissolved by landing birds or the breath of wind and returns, always in the same place, when the water again becomes still. But Raft’s quiescence in the pond seems momentary, an interlude in some longer journey.

For Reid, the five month gestation of the installation was a journey, a period that included the unexpected death of her sister and Reid’s decision to complete the work in her memory. Raft is suffused with awareness of the fragility of life; its metaphor of passage is evident whether or not one knows the history of its evolution. The work engages our imagination, momentarily resonating with our individual stories of transition. It recalls our often hidden sense of the magical as we consider the delicate glass structure and its mysterious cargo apparently floating gently on the reflective pond.

Raft is part object, part installation, part performance. The process of creating the many ceramic elements was laborious, but for Reid, also meditative. Each thrown sphere was handled many times, to modify the shape, to burnish the leather-hard raku clay with hand-held stones, to paint it with coloured slips and oxides before consigning it to a 1000°c electric kiln. Each element was masked and painted again with sand-laden slips before the final smoke firing in wood shavings. The installation was completed on site as the glass structure – reminiscent of fish traps, scaffolding or vertebrae – was gradually bound together, the ceramic forms secured within, and the pond slowly refilled. Early each morning it had to be checked, the pond level slightly raised or lowered, the marks of passing birds washed away and fallen leaves carefully removed. The process of tending the work became part of the ritual of its completion.
As with all performance and transient installation work, the traces exist as recollection – in memory, in photographs, videos, texts, or fragmentary objects. Raft was evanescent, glimmering on the limpid surface of the pond for a few brief weeks, before its disassembly and return to a studio community of elements awaiting future transformation into new forms.
Reid’s responses to the physical reality of the specific site – a pond within a constructed garden at the margin of an engineered lake in Australia’s bush capital – interwoven with technical skill and informed by her subtle narratives of fragility and transition, found resolution in an eloquently poetic work, metaphorically suspended between presence and absence.