detailed porcelain works of ceramic artist anne butler look back at the objects of the past

Ceramic artist Anne Butler

Inside her studio in Northern Ireland, ceramic artist Anne Butler grips the plastic cup filled with liquified Parian porcelain and pours it on the canvas before her, filling up the space drip by drip. She spreads the pale-blue goo with a card, creates straight lines over the thick rectangles the sweep forged, and repeats the process until she clothes the canvas with the solution.

Her hand moves seamlessly, the epitome of her decades of experimentation and passion for her craft, as she applies a white layer of porcelain over the blue one, cuts the edges of her canvas as the compound dries up, and transfers the thin sheet onto a surface next to her. She cuts it up into parts and inserts them into a bowl-shaped mold. Her subtleness soon unveils the charm of her delicate motion as she fires up her kiln, stacks the layers of dried Parian porcelain, and manifests finespun ceramics that capture the passage of time.

Trained in ceramics at the University of Ulster and the University of Wales in Cardiff, the profound relationship Anne grounded with Parian porcelain has bloomed into an intrinsic connection between her act of creating sculptures and her infinite experimentation with the fluid, solid, raw, and fired states of porcelain. ‘A wide palette of techniques, which include casting, hand-building and cyanotype print, are continually being challenged and developed to contrast the precision of industrial techniques and geometric structure with the fallibility of the handmade,’ she writes.

images from Anne Butler / banner image from her instagram

A delicate process

The delicacy of her sculptures recites commandments Anne must follow to reduce her works’ breakages. What she originally conceives before heating the sculptures may be altered. Nothing or everything remains the same. The reaction depends on the endurance of the thin porcelain sheets against the fire and whatever shape Anne lends them. ‘The sculptures are fired multiple times and explore concepts associated with the fired density of parian as well as its satin, marble-like quality when solid, its gravity and stratification when layered and its delicate fabric-like flowing translucency when thin,’ writes Anne.

The versatility of Parian porcelain cements the vernacular Anne seeks to establish: sculptures that swing between being featherlight and diaphanous, made with care and mastery. Upon a closer look, the layers of her series ‘Objects of Time’ prophesize a balm to recklessness and modern technology, a string that pulls the viewers back to the time of traditional craftsmanship and objects found in one’s former, everyday life.

Anne’s ‘Analogue’ portrays the rotary dial phone making a comeback as a fixture in one’s home, retaliating against the coming of smartphones and instant-messaging applications. The wax-like telephone seems to have been crafted through wispy paper, but the fluidity of Parian porcelain has given it a hyper-realistic imagery. In ‘Shift’, the artist looks back to the time where typewriters and their cranky, chunky keys dominated the desks and the writers’ den as she interpreted the writing tool through piles of dried porcelain sheets, cut into the required shapes to form a typewriter.

Anne’s investigative pursuit of classic objects ushered her to spawn a sewing machine found in homes. Titled ‘Remnant’, crumpled blankets of porcelain make up the body of the tool, while a non-textured cloth – still made from Parian porcelain – lies on the bottom of the machine to depict the textile being sewn, so vivid that hands may fail to falter from grazing over the creation to check if everything is still made in porcelain.

Object of Time series. ‘Shift’, 2018.

Archaeology, geology, and architecture

The artist has shared that there is a certain amount of warpage in her sculptures brought about by the kiln, so each work veers from being precise or how she originally wanted it to be like. Had she not experimented with the fragility of the Parian porcelain long ago, she could not accept the beauty of the flaws her creations produce.

The artist has also admitted that urban environments have influenced the way she sees her designs, the omen of the rows and folds she infuses into her art. The reminiscence of archaeology, geology, and architecture taps her creative zen and arouses her to explore the relationships between process, materiality, and the passage of time.

‘My sculptures are inspired by the structure and dissolution of the organic and manmade. They are constructed, layered, excavated, deconstructed, collapsed and fragmented to reveal associations between past, present and future, material cultural and individual memory as well as contrasting qualities such as strength and fallibility, permanence and loss,’ she shares. Upon seeing her ceramic works from Parian porcelain, the soothing union of contrasting and complementary elements comes to the surface to testify to her artistic desires.

Object of Time series. ‘Shift’, 2018.