Home and also somewhere else very far away:
Lynda Draper Lynda Draper’s skeletal ceramic constructions evolve intuitively like 3D drawings. New to Sullivan+Strumpf, Lynda has over 35 years of focussed studio practice and is recognised as a ceramic artist who constantly pushes the technical limits and conventional aesthetics of the medium. By Sonia Legge
In 2018 Lynda Draper was offered a three-month residency in the former music pavilion of Madame Elisabeth, sister of King Louis XVI. This was an invitation to live and work in Versailles and to exhibit the body of work that evolved at Galerie Lefebvre & Fils in Paris. It may come as no surprise that the sculptures created in this fairytale scenario conjure topiary, white marble, faces on urns, decorative ironwork and confectionery. Lynda wrote about this experience:
SUMMER 2020
Unlike my home environment, this surreal, strangely familiar, haunting landscape prompted me to consider my European heritage and question the complex character of early European cultural settlement within the Australian natural landscape. It made me aware of how on a subconscious level my world view and art practice has been informed by being raised on European rituals, history, parables and legends. Tales of kings, queens, princes and princesses, dark forests and wintery Christmases so alien to the Australian environment. However, far from being romantic, Draper’s sculptures tap into the broader human collective unconscious: universal mythologies linked to spirit images, masks, darkness and ghostlike forms.
For, while her sculptures glisten and shimmer and, as she herself reflected, look as if they might be made from bubble gum or paper-mâché, Draper’s work is also decidedly of the earth. Clearly we see the marks her fingers made pushing into the clay, pinching and encouraging it to achieve its final form. And despite their vivid, ‘unnatural’ colours, nature is in the arcing forms alluding to motion: splashing waves, ascending bird song; or to stasis: bones, ice. Thoughts about the flesh are also present in the tactile fragility of the clay and the sensuality of the fresh paint. Altogether Lynda Draper’s ceramic sculptures invite contemplation of some other realm. Paraphrasing the Australian surrealist artist James Gleeson, she sculpts what we know is there but we don't yet have the perception to see. She makes the intangible tangible. Lynda Draper was born in Sydney in 1962. She studied arts education/ceramics at UNSW, then at the National Art School. Now recognised as one of Australia’s finest and most revolutionary art practitioners working in the field of ceramics, she is considered to be an inspirational teacher and is currently Head of Ceramics at National Art School. She was included in Phaidon’s landmark 2017 book Vitamin C - Clay and Ceramic in Contemporary Art, a global survey of 100 of today's most important clay and ceramic artists.
