Many Parts Make a Whole (2022)
Glazed earthenware, plaster, timber, aluminum, oil, acrylic, enamel
Many Parts Make a Whole is an installation made up of a collection of large scale hand built ceramic objects with smaller objects made from plaster, and timber. There are three main characters. A garbage bin, an oversized cowboy hat, and a strange headlike brick statue, as well as small sculptures of cast plaster assemblages, and small cut out aluminium letters. The work is playful, absurd, and incongruous. It looks to the idea of non-traditional self-portraiture via the histories of the comic grotesque and caricature, where disembodied, anthropomorphic figures become stand-ins for the artist. Deeper though is an ontological rumination of human existence, of the body’s vulnerabilities, and the anxieties that come with living in the world today.
About the Artist
Chris Dolman lives on Gadigal Country in Sydney. His practice is imbued with incongruent and self-deprecating humour, used as both filter through which to see the world, and a device to poke fun at himself in the role of an artist, whilst exploring universal anxieties implicit in living in the world today. He has an MFA from Sydney College of Arts, Sydney University and has been awarded a Fauvette Loureiro Memorial Artists Traveling Scholarship; the Dyason Bequest (AGNSW); and grants from Australia Council for the Arts. He is represented by Galerie pompom, Sydney and Lefebvre et Fils Paris.
Transcription
My name is Chris Dolman and the title of my work is Many Parts Make a Whole.
The work is a collection of handbuilt ceramic objects, with smaller objects made from plaster, wood and timber, as well as aluminium that has been painted. There are three main characters, so to speak, a large garbage bin, an oversized cowboy hat and a strange head like statue. Between these characters some small sculptures of caste plaster shoes and cut out aluminium letters scattered around the small site.
The work as a whole is playful and absurd and incongruous and looks to the ideas of non traditional self portraiture, taking inspiration from the comic grotesque and caricature in art history, where these disembodied figures become kind of standings for myself the artist, and in saying that, the work talks about or asks ontological questions about human existence and the meaning of life and the anxieties that come with living in the world today. My work was made in various ways. The ceramics were handbuilt from clay, double fired, bisqued and then double fired and painted with Glazers and under glazers. The small sculptures have been poured with plaster and then painted with oil and enamel.
Rather than separate parts, though, I look at this work as one installation, hence the title. Many Parts Make up a Whole. My work deals with ontological themes of vulnerability and loss. The figures are both present and hidden from view. The body is present and yet missing. These things I feel like they could be half made or in a state of decrepitude, and this is how my installation fits. I think within the exhibition.
I would like viewers to be amused, to have fun and joke about the works, to contemplate, also thinking about the materials and how it might have been made, but also contemplate the nature of the works in a in a deeper way, these themes that might hint at more serious underlying ideas of mortality and death.