Image: Helen FULLER Untitled pot 2020, terracotta with underglaze, oxides, porcelain slip, wire, sandalwood. Collection of the artist. Photo by Grant Hancock. Image courtesy of Samstag Museum of Art.
This terracotta ceramic work by Helen Fuller was created in the year 2020. It measures 24 centimetres high and 25 centimetres wide. This work is positioned so it can be viewed from either side of its display. The object has the functional shape of a jug, with elongated spout and a handle made of a natural sandlewood branch attached by wire. The neck of the jug is narrow before rounding at its middle and narrowing once more at its base.
A patchwork of colours covers the exterior in blocks, grey, bright orange, lime green, white, a muddy red brown. Over the colours are dark muddy brown horizontal lines that wrap around the entire circumference of the jug like a ribbon, a centimetre in width. Within these rows, from top to bottom travel small vertical lines decorating and completing the surface of the work.
Fellow artist Glenn Barkley explains:
Like many ceramicists, Fuller finds that the pot or vessel – both its flatness and its volume –offers a new surface to decorate that has distinct advantages over a flat canvas. A vessel can be seen in the round – it may have no fixed front or back, or it could have both simultaneously.