RELATIONALITIES

KATHERINE GLENDAY

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04.29.2021 – 06.29.2021

This exhibition explores a new body of work by South African ceramicist Katherine Glenday, incorporating autobiographical elements from the artist’s ancestry dating back to the 18th-century Dutch trade of Chinese porcelain. The pieces on view highlight Glenday’s unwavering exploration of the porcelain’s range of expressive qualities; a material and its related techniques, she has honed over forty years. 

The centerpiece of the exhibition consists of an ensemble of dynamic vessels that embrace the delicate nature of the porcelain through intended imperfection, fixing in time movement, embodying the notions of spontaneity and chance. Placed in a continuum, each vessel is a part of a greater expression, within which, the light-pierced, soft porcelain skin and the negative space provide a meditative landscape. This installation draws inspiration from the artist’s ancestry’s seafaring porcelain trade. 

Relationalities conceptually arises from imagined encounters with the artist’s ancestor, Abraham de Smidt, who worked as a second mate on the Dutch East India ship, the Middleburg. His ship transported Chinese porcelain past the Cape of Good Hope. In 1788, the English, then at war with the Dutch, scuttled the ship and sunk it off the coast. De Smidt rowed ashore and settled in Cape Town, South Africa where his ancestor, Glenday, as a consequence, lives and works today. The tale of the Middleburg and her ancestors’ arrival to the continent has been a source of inspiration and reckoning for the artist. 

Through her material engagement with clay artifacts from that wreck, the artist has been able to compare and contrast social histories through conversation and imagination. Today she wrestles with the colonizing implications of her forebearer’s histories while simultaneously relating her intimacy with porcelain through the lens of her ancestor’s more ancient relationship to the origins of the matter.

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