ALMA STUDHOLME
’ACCREATION II: ONTOLOGICAL TRANSMUTATIONS’
14 JANUARY –30 JANUARY, 2016
Accreation II: Ontological Transmutations, 2016, Installation view. Photography by Document Photography.
ID: There is a collection of works spread across the gallery, From the left there is three white pointed ceramic structures, sitting on white bases. with a large circular pile of salt with various broken ceramics and bowls spread across the salt. In the middle forefront, there is a large spherical terracotta ball with a hole on the top, sitting on a pile of white salt. On the right hand side, there are two large white pointed ceramic pieces, one hanging directly over the other from the ceiling.
ARTIST STATEMENT
Alma Studholme's solo exhibition Accreation II: Ontological Transmutations is designed around the broken pieces of the "Firing Enso" porcelain sculpture featured in the Verge Gallery's 2015 group exhibition Accreation: Un-becoming and the Surface as Sight. The broken sculpture takes a central position in the Mandala Project which includes the Salt Mandala Installation and two videos; one being a collaboration with Youngdong Kim and the other Studholme's performance of making the salt mandala. Kim's recording of Studholme's brainwaves during meditation shows them transformed into Buddhist mandala patterns that are "broken" at certain intervals by distractions. The distractions are indicated in the video by the emerging colour.
Untitled, 2016, installation view, terracotta surfaced with terra sigilata, salt. Photography by Document Photography.
ID: There is a terracotta spherical ceramic ball with a hole on the top, sitting on a pile of white salt in a concrete gallery space, with a backdrop of a white wall.
The circle of the central salt mandala is mirrored in both videos as well as in all of the sculptures.
Big white conical forms, created as earthenware and mixed media sculptures, resulted from contemplation of the movement between a circle and a vanishing point as the single ending point of focus.
Vanishing Point Group, 2016, installation view, ceramics on mixed media bases. Photography by Document Photography.
ID: There are three white large pointed ceramic works that sit upon an individual white circular bases. There are two at the front and one behind in the middle. All sitting on the concrete ground with a white wall behind.
The only non-white form in the show is a big, round terracotta pot, surfaced with terra sigillata made out of red/orange clay collected on the east coast of Australia. The pot stands there as an earthy warm presence. Its globe-like appearance references the Earth itself and its circular motion.
Throughout the exhibition the ontological states of being fragmented and being whole are explored in visual links between a circle and a single point of focus.