'Ellipses and JPS' – John Paxie
Front Gallery, 25th May–4th July 2010
John Paxie is a gifted craftsman. He has years of experience of working clay on the wheel. He can throw an earthenware jug, cup or bowl in the time it takes you to read this line of print. He has a deep knowledge of glaze technology, from earth tones to the noble sophistication of a jade-like celadon. He can play with forms, putting a cup out of joint yet still making it stand upright, offering an invitation to drink with a wink.
Recently John saw the porcelain bowls of the Australian studio ceramacist Victor Greenaway in an exhibition in Dunedin. John went straight from the show to his wheel and made fine porcelain pieces with paper thin edges, with spiral designs and playful indentations along the lip, glazed with fleeting shades of celadon, that fade or intensify with the light.
But John has ambitions to fly down to earth from the cerebral clouds of fine porcelain. He is interested in installations, sculpture, crossing that invisible but tangible, if elusive, divide between craft and art. In 2009 he flipped coils of drying clay into brittle arrangements that resembled the cursive writing of his initials JP. A number of these were hung from pins as a wall installation in Art in Law II, an exhibition in the Faculty of Law at the University of Otago. Visitors to the exhibition were bemused. Was this pottery? Was it sculpture? What did it mean? Each could have formed the silhouette of a pair of scissors. Some thought that each flipped coil reminded them of an erect penis between two testicles rampant! It was the most talked of piece in the show.
John was drawn to sculpture by the work of that most unceramic sculptor Richard Serra, particularly his Torqued Ellipses – seven metres high!
John has started experimenting with heavy skeins of clay (each weighing five kilograms), hanging them from a metal cylinder held across a space on a piece of pipe. Gravity plays its part, stretching the heavy, slowly drying clay, eventually making stretch marks, like broken bubbles. Before breaking point the resulting ellipses were removed, their edges crimped, before firing. After the kiln the ellipses were painted with acrylic – the primary colours blue, yellow, red (not what potters do). The result is a new form of ceramic sculpture. Serra brought down to earth, fired and coloured.
Gone are the vessels, the traditions, the mindset of craft, the cosy world of pottery. John is now in his own vanguard of serial neo-minimalism, as mystical and profound as gravity itself."
Peter Stupples, 10 May 2010