green line
The thing that first strikes you on walking into Pip McManus's exhibition Green Line is its beauty. The luscious ultramarine, viridian and cobalt glazes, the delicate intaglio leaf forms, the textures, the exquisite details. The leaves of fig, fern, bauhinia, olive, oleander, jacaranda, float beneath the glazed surfaces as if glimpsed under still water. These perfect burned negatives of the original vibrate with presence, the temporal leaf transformed into the permanent symbol.
For many years McManus has worked as a professional ceramicist, making commercial domestic pieces and executing a number of local commissions in Alice Springs and its environs. She is a consummate craftswoman, with the knowledge and skill to push and risk her medium. Her exhibition Green Line, is evidence of her recent shift towards using her craft as a vehicle to explore the ideas which have been subtly implicit in her work for some time.
The seduction of texture, colour and detail, on closer examination, reveal an intention to address the big issues of our time, the weighty themes of genocide, displacement and dispossession. lt is interesting that as a long time Centralian McManus directly addresses the local issues of white/aboriginal relations only once, in the final panel of a series. lt is as if the years of living at the heart of the country, where the evidence of dispossession is a constant presence, have produced in the artist a poignant sense of its impact as a human phenomenon.
McManus first began to address these themes in The Poisoned Well, a work which evolved over a period of several years. The title is drawn from the writing of Anne Michaels, author of Fugitive Pieces. 'History is the poisoned