My Cobalt Blue's - new work by Jia Jia Chen

The Beaded Surface

 

My Cobalt Blue's

Jia Jia Chen

c3 contemporary art space
The Abbotsford Convent
St Heliers St. Abbotsford
17 August 2016

Jia Jia Chen plays with the process of ceramics. Her glaze is dominantly present in blobs, splashes, dollops and beads of nepheline syenite and cobalt oxide melted onto the non-vitrified bed of alumina. The unpredictable and multitudinous result of Chen's process is hundreds of unique glass-like beads. These have been applied to surface of hand pinched vessels and display tables using a loose mosaic technique. The effect is one of intricacy and glossy tactile patterning.

I am reminded of  PixCell-Deer by Kohei Nawa who covered a taxidermied deer with artificial crystal glass. Nawa enveloped surface is so seductively beautiful yet up the glass bead magnify the gentle patter of fur of this beast. The result is a feeling of suffocating and reduction of nature to a synthetic artifice.

Chen's surfaces also have an alluring presence as 'china-blue' engulf surfaces. Is this a benign act of nature or a miscreant colonisation of once recognisable table ware.