It is with great pleasure that Terra Delft Gallery will present work by the British artist Katharine Morling from March 15 through April 12, 2014. This is the first time her work will be shown in the Netherlands.
Morling began her career making glazed majolica, but was not happy with that: in that manner, embedded in tradition, she did not see herself as an artist. In 2007, at the Royal College of Art, MA Glass and Ceramics, she discovered how she wanted to work: drawing became important.
Her work changed completely when she started with her black-and-white pieces, sometimes life-size. These pieces begin as sketches which she translates into 3D. She calls herself a three-dimensional person: she wants to walk around things and observe them from all sides. First she makes small models, in order to puzzle out how the finished piece should look; then she sketches the details on patches of clay. The objects remain unglazed because she likes the uncertainty that that evokes: people are not accustomed to unglazed white clay (although this may be more so in England than in the Netherlands). The viewers want to touch it, to feel if it is perhaps paper. It gives an extra dimension to the objects. With black she delineates contours and adds idiosyncratic graphic details.
Domestic objects, tools and furniture, worked into still lifes, make reference to daily life. Original work, with a nod to surrealism, has brought this artist no small amount of international fame.
Etty Walda