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Details
- Date
- 2018
- Media categories
- Ceramic , Sculpture
- Materials used
- clay, glaze
- Dimensions
- 18.5 x 27.0 x 17.5 cm
- Signature & date
Signed and dated inner rim of base, black felt tip pen "Kathy Butterly/... 2018".
- Credit
- Purchased with funds provided by the Mervyn Horton Bequest 2018
- Location
- Not on display
- Accession number
- 581.2018
- Copyright
- © Kathy Butterly
- Artist information
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Kathy Butterly
Works in the collection
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About
New York-based artist Kathy Butterly has been making ceramic sculptures since the 1990s when she studied at the University of California under Robert Arneson. In her work Butterly carries forward the tradition of West Coast ceramic artists such as Arneson, as well Ken Price and Viola Frey, and brings to this lineage a decisive painterly quality that is nowhere more evident than in her layered surfaces and firebrand use of colour. Indeed Butterly often refers to herself as a painter who “happens to work with clay”.
Butterly’s sculptural practice is one of discovery and intuition. Never coming to a work with a predetermined idea, she instead finds the direction of her work – its lines, weight, shapes and eventual form – during the process of making. While her earlier works centred upon the relationship between the vessel and the figure, 'Whirld' is part of a body of work that sits firmly within the realm of abstraction and celebrates the possibilities of material and glaze.
Of 'Whirld', Butterly has remarked: “I found the initial form very intriguing and difficult to figure out. I remember thinking while working on this piece how interconnected everything is... I was looking at [it] as figure, landscape, world as one -- trying to find balance in the beauty and chaos of our moment.”
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Exhibition history
Shown in 4 exhibitions
Kathy Butterly: thought presence, James Cohan Gallery, New York, 06 Sep 2018–20 Oct 2018
An Idea Needing to be Made: Contemporary Ceramics, Heide Museum of Modern Art, Melbourne, 27 Jul 2019–20 Oct 2019
Matisse Alive, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 11 Oct 2021–03 Apr 2022
Open Studio (brick vase clay cup jug), Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 01 Jul 2023–07 Jan 2024