Bouke de Vries
Netherlander Bouke de Vries trained first in design at Eindhoven and Central St Martins and worked with John Galiano, Stephen Jones and Zandra Rhodes before retraining in ceramics conservation and restoration, a skill that is integral to his recently developed artistic practice. Using reclaimed broken china, glass and pottery, often pieces that have lost a high value in their breaking, de Vries reconstructs them in fragmented or altered forms. He describes their breaking as their trauma - the most dramatic episode in the life of a ceramic object - and he explores and emphasises this point, looking to both the life and value of the broken ceramic, his own experience from Dutch 17th and 18th century still-life painting he saw growing up and to contemporary life.
Teapot
|
Sculpture
32.5cm x 23cm x 25cm
Mixed media, 18th century chinese export porcelain teapot
This piece brings to light the odd existence of de Vries’s restorations: The pot remains in pieces, in evidence to its end, or trauma as de Vries calls it. It is no longer able fulfil its function, yet the artists arranges it as if in use. The tea sieve hangs down into the limitless insides of the pot, while one fragment of the shell hovers, as if to demonstrate it release from function.
£1,500
Close