Materielle Kultur
Looking at Susan Ostling's recent exhibition at Savode at Saint John's, it is immediately clear that her ceramic pieces are not 'functional ware' as the term is used in craft discourse. Ostling cuts across the quibbling between categories of art and craft. Clay is her medium and she uses it to say what she wants. Her tiles become her canvas while her bowls refer to and speak beyond their function as containers.
Lusciously glazed bowls and platters tell of their function as containers of food by having three dimensional shell and plant forms fused into their bellies. The shell forms are arranged in rows, as are the tiles hung along the gallery wall and the Aboriginal artifacts drawn onto sets of tiles on the floor. The serial arrangement of objects speak not only of collections but also of the collectors and arrangers of objects. Two vastly different kinds of collection are referred to: firstly the traditional Aboriginal way of collecting food to be eaten, and secondly collection for the purposes of classification and preservation. The latter is aligned with the white European settlers of Australia, who brought with them a scientific culture which seeks to define itself through the collection and display of material objects.
References to these two cultures , the Aboriginal and the Euro-centred, English- speaking, Australian culture pervade Ostling's exhibition at Savode. The culture of the first Australians is aligned with a more fluid and transient use of objects compared with the colonising culture which strives towards self-perpetuation through notions of permanence and preservation, notions it embodies in a set of frozen historical referents known as specimens. The fluidity of the Aboriginal way of living and being