Revive, Remix, Respond Artist Spotlight: Stephen Bowers
Austrialian artist Stephen Bowers is renowned for his richly decorated ceramics which reflect his interest in art history, craft traditions, pattern, and memory. His work is generally informed by aspects of the past and he spent time reviewing many pieces in The Frick Pittsburgh’s collection “to see what dialogue or response they might suggest.” For the Revive, Remix, Respond exhibition, Bowers created a series of “Fragment” plates with shards of imagery from select works in The Frick Pittsburgh’s collection.
Bowers was particularly captivated by the masterful painting on a pair of Qianlong vases decorated with sprays of peaches and chrysanthemums. Representing a scientific and artistic pinnacle of Chinese ceramics, each vase bears a six-character reign mark indicating they were made under imperial patronage. The painting is masterful—the flowers and leaves are botanically precise and delicately expressive—qualities Bowers captures in his homage.
Bowers has described his work as a sustained investigation into hand-painted imagery using ceramics as a canvas. The vivid colors and intricate layers of decoration are built up in stages across many firings, illustrated in the below images showing various stages of progress. Unlike the Qianlong vases, which were done with an on-glaze enamel technique, Bowers painted his compositions in underglaze.
Bowers made three additional plates, including one inspired by the “marvelous, eye-watering color” of an 1880 cabinet plate by Minton & Company.
But this was not the only object Bowers made in response to the Minton plate. In a work that references historical printmaking processes, industrial pottery forms, and book illustrations, Bowers envisioned one of literature’s best known adventurers—Alice of Wonderland—seguing into a Frick-inspired tableau wrapping around a small Staffordshire-style mug. As Bowers explained in his proposal, “The work adapts its sources to stage a new narrative of possibility, where three diverse elements (Alice, the crane, and a kangaroo) encounter each other… In keeping with the strain of homage that lies at the heart of such work, details of the originals are recognizably reproduced and echoed; they are familiar, but selectively altered and rearranged. Minton’s bright multi-hued enamel colors are distilled into a dark brushwork of monotone in tertiary cobalt, itself a further echo of the classic sources of ‘blue and white.’”
The below images show Bowers’ artistic process. First, the cup form is thrown on a pottery wheel and the shaped handle is added. Bowers lightly outlines the design with a pencil sketch before painting the decoration by hand in blue underglaze. The video below shows how the scene unfurls across the body of the cup, like a Japanese scroll.
Bowers has described his work as a sustained investigation into hand-painted imagery using ceramics as a canvas. The vivid colors and intricate layers of decoration are built up in stages across many firings, illustrated in the below images showing various stages of progress. Unlike the Qianlong vases, which were done with an on-glaze enamel technique, Bowers painted his compositions in underglaze.
Bowers made three additional plates, including one inspired by the “marvelous, eye-watering color” of an 1880 cabinet plate by Minton & Company.
But this was not the only object Bowers made in response to the Minton plate. In a work that references historical printmaking processes, industrial pottery forms, and book illustrations, Bowers envisioned one of literature’s best known adventurers—Alice of Wonderland—seguing into a Frick-inspired tableau wrapping around a small Staffordshire-style mug. As Bowers explained in his proposal, “The work adapts its sources to stage a new narrative of possibility, where three diverse elements (Alice, the crane, and a kangaroo) encounter each other… In keeping with the strain of homage that lies at the heart of such work, details of the originals are recognizably reproduced and echoed; they are familiar, but selectively altered and rearranged. Minton’s bright multi-hued enamel colors are distilled into a dark brushwork of monotone in tertiary cobalt, itself a further echo of the classic sources of ‘blue and white.’”
The below images show Bowers’ artistic process. First, the cup form is thrown on a pottery wheel and the shaped handle is added. Bowers lightly outlines the design with a pencil sketch before painting the decoration by hand in blue underglaze. The video below shows how the scene unfurls across the body of the cup, like a Japanese scroll.