Artist’s Statement:

Abbie Read, Solicited collaboration: Alchemy I. [Fiona MacKay stoneware plate, epoxy resin, urushi lacquer, gold powder. 200 x 200 mm]. 2020

An undoing. 
A wound, a healing.
Opulent scars.
Symmetry erased, raisin d’être supplanted.
A transmutation; an alchemy; an acculturation.
Journeying to the borders of permissibility; 
the act of destruction as creation.
An amending and mending of another artist’s work; 
the very act of which smudges orderly lines of authorship.

Ordinarily, a broken object is perceived as worthless, yet with craftsmanship, time and the incorporation of precious metal, it is honoured and made more valuable. 

In the Japanese tradition of Kintsugi, fragmented crockery is not only reconnected but transmuted from utilitarian commodity to unique artefact thus rendering it invaluable.

‘Kin’ means ‘gold’. ‘Tsugi’, ‘to bond or connect’; not only pieces but people, cultures and their shared histories.

Born in Britain, as was I, New Zealand ceramicist Fiona Mackay creates Japanese style stoneware with clay originating from South Korea. A professional artist in her own right, her exquisite pieces are fully functioning artisanal ‘readymades’.

As we utilise the techniques and materials of another culture, we negotiate our ethical right to do so: Korean clay and Japanese processes wielded by European hands on antipodal soil; Each nation has moulded and shaped the other in an unsolicited collaboration, a complex acculturation and precious entanglement; a transmutation of its own.

As I take ownership of Fiona’s work, and break and mend it, the boundaries of definitive authorship also fracture. With the simple addition of a process or material, I have made it more mine. This too is an assimilation of culture; the overlaying of one artist’s practice over another’s; a colonisation of sorts.

What are ceramics, but moulded clay; shaped earth? In Christian doctrine, Genesis depicts humanity forged from earth. Clay is but damp dust. Dust to dust. It speaks of the temporal nature of all things, both animate and non; the eventual dissolution of all matter.

‘Le roi est mort, vive le roi!’