Alex McCurdy - Porcelain, Mixed Media

My work is influenced by my Master’s degree thesis research on women's central role in Western textile history, and by my mother's involvement in the British yard goods industry earlier last century.

My new series of boxes merge the techniques of textiles and clay, decorative surface and form. Through a complex process, I am able to duplicate woven fabric in porcelain. The boxes push the envelope of traditional ceramics by challenging the notion that ceramics must be functional. At the same time, they awaken the viewer’s curiosity. The fabric textured porcelain, combined with the woven slip, tricks people into taking a second look. The boxes connect conceptually to the hidden potential of Pandora’s Box, and the mystery of the black box of an aircraft—influenced by my father, who was shot down during WW2—as well as the Perspective Box by Dutch artist Samuel van Hoogstraten. They are self-portraits, reflecting the constant moving as a naval child, plus 50 years of working in isolation in my studio.

The box is a potent metaphor for women in ceramics, utilizing the feminine principal of containment and enclosure. I have embellished the external in an ambiguous way, leaving the inner workings to the viewer's imagination.

The “woven” boxes are made by slip-trailing thixotropic porcelain slip onto plaster bats covered with cheese cloth.  This process simulates the warp and weft of weaving. After the final firing, I embellish the tops and sides with copper and silver wire, garnets, stones with lucky rings, text, and silk-screened images. I am essentially “weaving” the stories of my life as a mother, grandmother, wife and dog owner at my seaside home in Nova Scotia, Canada.