Kirsty Collins
Artist Bio
Loud Materials is a collection of sculptures inspired by the spontaneity of Sumi brushstrokes and Bernini's terracotta sketches. The phantasmagorical Landscapes extend the Shan-Shui genre, with gestural disruptions marking embodied landscape forms. As a deaf artist, Collins uses the installation to sense her body moving through space and sound. The glaze materials are expressionistic, frozen in flux, and appear unstable and spontaneous. The sensuality of the surfaces invites you to feel Landscapes in motion, with silver clouds billowing up like fossilised vapour. Some artworks also include small texts reflecting on the artist's experience of disability and isolation during the pandemic.
Kirsty Collins is an artist living and working on the traditional lands of the Gadigal people in Sydney. Kirsty’s life was transformed by sudden bilateral deafness and subsequent disability. Formerly a pioneer in digital/web art direction, she left this career in 2002 to pursue a contemporary sculpture practice. Her work successfully bridges the gap between ceramic craft, technology and contemporary sculpture.
Conventional ceramicists may find her dualistic craft-conceptual platform unconventional as she frequently combines techniques of carving and moulding with hand-building and wheel-work. Inspired by Bernini's terracotta sketches, Collins combines ceramic firing and sophisticated gaze-tech with digital media. Despite this seeming complexity, her work is simple and unashamedly beautiful with gravity-defying forms that revel in wonkiness, with bold colours and a kind of painterly-ness and vulnerability.
Kirsty has a BFA(UNSW COFA) and a MFA in electronic and temporal art from USYD SCA.
Artwork StatementConventional ceramicists may find her dualistic craft-conceptual platform unconventional as she frequently combines techniques of carving and moulding with hand-building and wheel-work. Inspired by Bernini's terracotta sketches, Collins combines ceramic firing and sophisticated gaze-tech with digital media. Despite this seeming complexity, her work is simple and unashamedly beautiful with gravity-defying forms that revel in wonkiness, with bold colours and a kind of painterly-ness and vulnerability.
Kirsty has a BFA(UNSW COFA) and a MFA in electronic and temporal art from USYD SCA.
Loud Materials is a collection of sculptures inspired by the spontaneity of Sumi brushstrokes and Bernini's terracotta sketches. The phantasmagorical Landscapes extend the Shan-Shui genre, with gestural disruptions marking embodied landscape forms. As a deaf artist, Collins uses the installation to sense her body moving through space and sound. The glaze materials are expressionistic, frozen in flux, and appear unstable and spontaneous. The sensuality of the surfaces invites you to feel Landscapes in motion, with silver clouds billowing up like fossilised vapour. Some artworks also include small texts reflecting on the artist's experience of disability and isolation during the pandemic.