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.
Dead nature 9
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Sculpture
18cm x 25.5cm x 18cm
Mixed media, 18th century chinese porcelain vase
Again de Vries employs tokens of transcendence in this work with both the egg (to chicken) and butterfly (from grub). You can see the metamorphic element of de Vries work clearly here too, as the flowers, originally placed fresh, have curled around the broken vase.
£1,500
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