Suvira McDonald
Cloudcatcher
Ceramic Art

Exhibition: 15th - 27th June 2004

My early visual art career was focussed on the work of a potter, thus providing an insight into the materials of the earth and the fire that transforms them. This earth-passion has evolved through sculptural explorations into my current deliberations in the landscape genre. I see landscape eroded and relayered with sediment whose origins we strive to comprehend, formed over geological time which transcends our understanding. In immediate terms we quarry the material and it becomes the stuff of our tableware, roof tiles and sculpture.

Landscape art, akin to spirituality, may pursue beauty. In Heidelberg, the concern was with light and an artist's cultural backgroundit is interesting how cultural baggage affected it. My concern is tangibility, texture, an aesthetic of the raw, rugged horizon. My photo documentary bushwalking excursions are en-plein-air, followed by virtual and graphite interpretations, culminating in a slurry-formed landscape fired in the conditions of modern technology.....a kind of interplay of classic with contemporary.