Through a ceramics practice that is connecting to both beaux-arts tradition and popular culture narratives, I have become increasingly intrigued by the romanticisation of pastoral landscape, its inhabitants, and how this informs unrealistic aesthetic expectations of a benign idealised agrarian society.
As a 'farm-girl' from good country stock, I find these notions to be somewhat humorous, especially in the context of New Zealand, a small geographically isolated country built upon an iconic green agricultural brand.
Recent examination of the eighteenth-century porcelain tradition has highlighted for me, that romanticised socio-cultural ideals of class, livelhood and status, are not confined to our contemporary notions of 'lifestyle'.
For those in the southern hemisphere, the traditions of ancien régime European porcelain and its historical implications are equally as remote as sublime impressions of antipodean rural idyll.
Seizing the opportunity to co-opt these far-flung, but intriguingly connected confections of status, inheritance, livelihood and wealth, my work plays within a 'topsy-turvy' world of pony-club charm, pompous agricultural field-days and genuine rural pride.