Narelle White
Narelle White is an early-career artist with a passion for the messy unpredictability of ceramic process. She approaches ceramic labour as a field of enquiry and discovery, and engages her materials as willful co-conspirators. Her work explores qualities such as porosity, contingency and subjectivity to change; underpinned by an observance of the animacy of matter. Individual pieces may undergo multiple firings in a creative cycle of collapse and repair. Every test and ‘failure’ is carefully preserved and folded back into new sculptures.
White is a recent graduate of the Honours program at the Victorian College of the Arts. In the summer of 2019-2020, Narelle undertook an intensive residency at the European Ceramic Work Centre in Oisterwijk as a beneficiary of an Ian Potter Cultural Trust grant. In 2021, McClelland Sculpture Park+Gallery launched a limited edition of her works in their shop. White has been shortlisted for numerous awards, including the Manningham Ceramic Art Award, the Wyndham Art Prize, the McClelland Small Sculpture Award and the Victorian Craft Awards. Her recent exhibitions include UNPREDICT: Imagining Future Ecologies with Ian Potter Museum of Art; and SKY, SURFACE, SOIL with Cluster Crafts for London Craft Week 2021. Narelle works from the Kingston Arts Centre, on Bunurong country.
I work in a creative cycle of collapse and repair. Every test and ‘failure’ is carefully preserved and folded back into new sculptures…My personal hope is to articulate an ethic of care and reflect on the quality of artist-material relations and how this manifests in an artwork. Working in collaboration with matter requires a recognition of mutual interdependence. It is critical that we examine the way we think about and see materials.
/ Narelle White