ARTIST STATEMENT
 

"Perhaps my favourite sculpture in the Met Museum collections is a 17th century porcelain lion: kitschy and mass-produced, made for a wide audience – but it is weird, the facial expression ambiguous, blurred somewhere between cheery, vacant and sly. I imagine it haunting homes of the moderately well-off, its strange gaze following people around the room from its place on a shadowy mantel. The in-betweenness of the expression is something that I want to capture in my work.

I love the mutability of ceramics. In the plastic state it only takes the merest nudge for one thing to become another, and even as it’s hardened in the kiln, glazes can distort the surface and change the object’s character again. How something is then interpreted is just as changeable, dependent on the personal history of the observer as well as the context in which it is displayed. Perhaps this is especially so when something is vaguely anthropomorphic – our primitive brains are wired to find faces anywhere, and where faces already exist, we perceive emotion so readily, even when the expression is half-baked. But change the light, or approach in a different mood, and the emotional transmission can shift.
 

Bright Side is a collection of characters that teeter on the brink of one state and another. A bright side can only exist with darkness as contrast. A silver lining suggests the clouds are largely black. In retort to the existential bleakness of our age, awash with genocide, a widening gulf between ideologies, advancing environmental collapse - I am seeking out small ways to tip the balance in favour of optimism, or at least to find some respite in the absurd."
 

BIO
 

Georgia Harvey (Naarm/Melbourne, Australia) is an artist guided by an interest in inanimate objects that convey a sense of anima. Originally studying painting at RMIT, she later trained and worked as a conservator before developing a sculptural practice, inspired by the artefacts encountered in her conservation work. In 2016 she moved to Sharjah (UAE) and spent several years working and exploring in the region. Her idiosyncratic sculptures demonstrate a fondness for ritual objects of the ancient world imbued with quiet humour, with surfaces and textures that elicit touch.