Essay - The lyric forms of Louise Boscacci

Poise. That is the first thing to say. It seems simple this concept of poise, but repose in objects is a divine quality. We see things and pick them up; we weigh them against our body to find a likeness and shape that matches ideas and experience. It is like nature: the fall of light on land creating contrast or reflections in water. Similarly it is the province of things; the lyric quality of a bowl or bell, allusive but present.

Louise Boscacci models forms such as the flask, the distended vase and the elongated bowl. They are distinctively hers. Often they stand alone and upright but have been seen to lie on their sides to fit to another piece or group. There are now many permutations to the Boscacci group with endless potential for play between forms which suit her particular ideas for a piece and a method of working. Here is an artist in control of her craft and her medium - porcelain, ‘the white gold’ as it is named. Indeed Boscacci uses porcelain exhaustively and has thought a lot about its use: ‘porcelain to catch the transience of light - daily, seasonable, particular to place’ and its meaning. Increasingly porcelain has taken on greater personal significance for her and she is lucid on the point: ‘porcelain continues to teach me about ongoing loss.’ This comment in itself is autobiographical and suggests her childhood near Townsville; the dry and wet seasons, the heat, objects made symbolic through time, the loss of a parent.

At the time of writing Boscacci’s working subtitle for this exhibition is ‘Time, Light and Loss’, significant because these are all issues of great importance in the life of a Boscacci object. Similarly the titles of individual pieces are carefully chosen and prove to be wonderfully evocative. In this exhibition we find: ‘Twenty - three years canteen’, ‘Home travel kit’, Each new silence on old (for Rachel Carson)’

Titles add weight to meaning. It is a wonderful strength because together our eye and mind have more work to do. This opens our perception, suggesting some other use for her pieces, and some other time outside of the ceramic itself. Boscacci has written about the effect of the symbolic object; her concerns with the object as a crystalline form able to reflect a variety of meanings, which for her are always, ‘personal, historical and phenomenological.’

‘I have articulated elsewhere in published writing, conceptual links between the making of 3D objects for the hold of the hand as well as eye, and place-settings: embedded encounters of place and home.’

Pattern and surface etching also play a part in the objects of this exhibition, adding to both the allure of forms and to their meaning. These marks and patterns are decorative but not used ornamentally viz. structurally, to prettify and fuss the surface. Striations, inlay and sgraffito are an avant pattern, that is to say an irregular embellishment, beyond decoration, and serve to connect the ceramics to the earth in terms of their making and to the landscape in imaginative terms.

Inside these forms can be delicious, quite pretty colours and glazes. All ceramic artists must attend to the lip, the base and the interior of their forms to achieve a desired balance. This is fundamental, they are parts of a ceramic which are always active and contribute hugely to the way an object is perceived and handled. In Boscacci’s bowls the consideration of inside - outside and lip to base is significantly enlarged. We find lines suggestive of geological strata or maps which are loosely literal and tie the form to a place.

Here Cootharinga July flask 2006 is instructive. This flask form has been used before - it is a staple of the Boscacci vocabulary - and here it carries, I think, an eponymous map or diagram. I am fixed by the squat base of the flask. It is a safe shape, well grounded and in this case hand thrown and solid of touch. I know this form well because I have a flask myself which is cast. It comes up from a surface lightly and each time I am surprised by the apparent contradiction of shape to weight. The Cootharinga flask is like a water vessel and has a potential use and reference to the dry landscape. July is in the title. Why July? Perhaps it is better to not know. As Louise Boscacci has noted elsewhere in a published essay, places are, ‘not on any map; true places never are.’

The other great issue of Boscacci’s work is the written word and it proves to be hugely evocative. This exhibition features a pairs of bowls and a singular bowl under the rubric of Learning local. Unique to her, and to what is a thorough continuing preoccupation, we see script - tracts; white on white, white on black, delineating and over writing forms much in the manner of the diarist who keeps notes and enters ideas as a field botanist or zoologist might in her work in the landscape. And of course this is what Boscacci once was.

Learning local is in many ways typical of Boscacci’s process. It has the river as its dominant theme (melody), yet acknowledges the sum of its parts (notes), which here are the individual vessels and scoops. It breathes the past into the present, combining memory and the written word. Here Boscacci treads a fine line between a type of ceramics which is literary and lyric in content but in form expresses an actualité, that of making her experience real and topical for us.

Indeed one feels Boscacci never loses sight of ceramics as an idée fixe. The practice of the wheel and the cast, of making and decorating, the cycle of ever diminishing formal returns. I think for her the idea and form must be synonymous, a representation of a felt landscape, something read, seen or remembered, transmuted into objects that reach beyond a received idea of ceramics, evoking forms which raise the emotional temperature of a viewer.

There is something else in this exhibition which signals a departure and I think a new direction for Boscacci. That is Home bell (Rhizophora calling) 2005 - 6. Two objects then: a bell or at least a cast of a bell that Boscacci has had since childhood and the cast of a propagule, a germinated seedling of the mangrove which is long and sinuous. Once the root takes hold in the right substrate, leaves bud from the other end. To Boscacci this as she has commented is ‘magic’ and a starting point of some dimension.

Notwithstanding the paring of these elegant forms there is much by way of association to bring to bear on this piece. Boscacci has said herself, ‘bells are functional and symbolic, secular and sacred, and as idiophones make signal and voice - sound and signal.’

So far I have seen two possible combinations for Home bell but in each the reiteration of the vertical to the horizontal confirms a human presence. In maginative terms, moreover, the combination of bell and root is truly evocative. Once again Boscacci has set in motion her gestalt of the whole made from relevant parts, each element adding to an overall effect. Home bell speaks to us in the way that a verse would, a recitation in song or sounds in nature, each object with its own voice.

Brett Ballard 2006