movie day: Ceramic artist Joy Trpkovic

Joy Trpkovic is an award winning ceramic artist. She works predominantly in porcelain, creating distinctive translucent vessels, wall installations and collections of tiny sculptures inspired by sea forms, strata, fossils and funghi. http://www.createdbespoke.com/artist/Joy Joy studied Fine Art at Goldsmiths’ College in London, Portsmouth University and University of Sussex. Her Fine Art education as a painter enriches her work as a studio ceramicist and allows her to approach using clay with aesthetic and technical freedom. After teaching Art for some years, Joy set up her own studio. Since 1979, her work has been widely exhibited in Britain, Europe and the U.S.A; in Minnesota, Zurich, Basle, New Delhi and most recently, Alcora, Spain; and she has enjoyed numerous solo exhibitions in England. Joy’s work is held in public collections at Southampton City Museum and Art gallery, Leicester County Council and the Permanent Collection at the Museum of Ceramics, Alcora, Spain. Creating with porcelain that has been aged to increase plasticity for hand building, Joy uses only the simplest tools – fingers, the palm of a hand, a scalpel, a small boxwood stick and fine paintbrushes. Joy prefers direct contact with the clay rather than casting or throwing, although her preferred process is much more time consuming. Joy aims for delicate translucency in her work and enjoys the risks inherent in using porcelain as it grows and shrinks during firing – Her thinnest vessels are made from 0.5mm sheet. Mini sculptures are assembled in bespoke acrylic box frames to enable all round viewing and light passing through. Some Shard Wall Pieces are inserted into board and then framed with museum glass to avoid reflections.

Sin-ying Ho – Past Forward @ Hood Museum in Dartmouth

Sin-ying Ho, World Garden No. 1 (detail), 2014, porcelain, high-fired reduction, hand-painted cobalt pigment, high-fired under-glaze decal transfer, clear glaze. Courtesy of the artist and Ferrin Contemporary.

March 30, 2018, through May 27, 2018

If Chinese ceramic art has a heart, it beats in Jingdezhen. For centuries, artisans there have made vessels that traveled far and wide. Their fluid forms and recognizable decorations have inspired celebratory prose and devoted followers around the world. Today, Sin-ying Ho works in these same ceramics factories. Though Jingdezhen potters have long defined tradition, Sin-ying has expanded both their forms and their imagery in contemporary ceramics that are thoroughly of the twenty-first century. She makes her works—whether they are monumental vases or smaller, more clearly assembled sculptures—from multiple parts. She emphasizes the many parts by glazing each of the pieces differently. Together they form a whole that maintains the legacy of being created from myriad fragments.

Sin-ying’s process of building is an essential metaphor for her artistic practice. With it, she implies an optimism for our society’s continued ability to construct a unified world. As reflected in her technique, and in the themes addressed by her surface imagery, this world will necessarily be an amalgam of new and old, here and there, greed and generosity, men and women, faith and despair. Through these combinations, Sin-ying shares a worldview that acknowledges the inherent contradictions and challenges of global culture while also anticipating the uncanny beauty emerging all around us.

This exhibition was organized by the Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth, and generously supported by the Philip Fowler 1927 Memorial Fund.

http://hoodmuseum.dartmouth.edu/explore/exhibitions/sin-ying-ho