OPENING EVENT: Wednesday 18th September, 5.30-7.30pm

Fiona Jack presents a new series of  "earth posters" made in collaboration with Melbourne based poet and artist Sholto Buck as well as a new collaborative work made with Elisabeth Pointon.

PUBLIC CLAY
Fiona Jack and Sholto Buck

Public Clay is Fiona Jack’s second collection of clay posters. For this iteration, Jack worked with Sholto Buck—a poet living in Naarm (Melbourne), and drew from his debut book In the Printed Version of Heaven (Rabbit, 2023).

Buck’s witty observations of private thoughts and public actions careen from melancholia to self-ridiculousness – he wants a million dollars and he wants it in the form of trousers. Jack brings Buck’s poems into conversation with a transmutation of a form that she has returned to countless times over 30 years – the poster. If a poster is urgent, instructive, and attention-seeking, then these poem-posters make the elusive demand that an atmosphere be felt. Wood fired clay grounds this urgency with a call to slowness with a surface that makes them ghostly and legible only through careful attention.

The posters were made in Jack’s Avondale studio, born from a string of zoom calls and messages between Sholto and Fiona considering the shape of poems, indents, full-stops, fonts, fire and clay. They were then stacked in polystyrene fish boxes and driven to Taranaki to wood fire for 17 hours in Paul Maseyk’s kiln which is dug into the hills above the Waiwhakaiho River. The process of wood firing is long and involved, but to Fiona “the results always seem to be imbued with the things that happen in the process of firing them - alchemy, community, friendship, laughter, extreme heat, ash, unpredictability and always a few nerves”.

One early use for clay (circa 3000BC) was the tablet - inscribed with poems and script. Commonly these were unfired and reused multiple times, but it is assumed that many of those that survived were accidentally fired when a structure caught fire. The poet Ariana Reines has said that in alchemy, the process of turning a liquid into a vapour is called levity. Perhaps to capture words in clay is some kind of escape, a form of levity, albeit in disguise. “Seeing what I wrote, written again but this time in clay, I feel like the words aren’t mine. Finally!”

BIG BUSINESS
Fiona Jack and Elisabeth Pointon

For the window of Melanie Roger Gallery, Fiona Jack has collaborated with Tāmaki based artist Elisabeth Pointon. Their shared interest in objects that commemorate overlooked moments led their collaboration to the shaping of a giant mug – a form familiar to both their practices, albeit a bit bigger. For Pointon the corporate mug has been one of many vehicles to talk to her experience in the workplace through critique of language, accessibility, visibility and representation. Jack is interested in the cup as a form that is at once ubiquitous and intimate. It is the main currency of exchange within pottery communities, and personal cup collections index a potter’s passage through time and community.

Part commemorative cup, part trophy, Jack and Pointon’s cup outgrew its aspiration. It sits in the window with a flashing neon Big Business sign, dreaming of bigger things.

Fiona Jack is an artist based in Auckland, New Zealand. Her work considers sociopolitical issues and the ways we represent ourselves to each other. Within most projects there are aspects of participation, consultation and/or collaboration with people and groups. Through observation, dialogue, collecting and digressive historical research Jack pieces together a fabric of references that inform the development of each body of work. Jack has an MFA from CalArts Los Angeles and is Head of School at Te Waka Tūhura Elam School of Fine Art at Waipapa Taumata Rau The University of Auckland.

This is her first solo exhibition with Melanie Roger Gallery.

Visit our guest artist pages for further information about Sholto Buck and Elisabeth Pointon.