Laura White ~ White Mud 2018

White Mud was made in response to Worcester's porcelain trade for the site specific Meadow Arts exhibition 'The Precious Clay'.

White is interested in yh process of porcelain which is what she has created a conversation around for her commissioned piece.

Her work creates a question about what is precious and what we surround ourselves with, engaging with the materiality of our lives.

The work itself is a culmination of replicated porcelain pieces from the collection, decorative piece she purchased online and items from the every day, for example a lynx shower gel bottle, all of these items were 3D printed into porcelain.

Whites comment through use of a once precious clay and what is precious to us now depicts ideas around the value of now and the frailty of everything, think this is a really interesting concept to surround art as a whole .

The Precious Clay, a meadow arts collaboration exhibition

The purpose of the show is to combine old and new, showing contemporary work in a collection of old ceramics using a culmination commissioned works for the show and a collection of preexisting art.

Upon entry to the show the free hand out booklets are offered, and after speaking with Anne de Charmant (Director of Meadow Arts), she enlightened me as to the reason they provided free handouts. This is so the exhibition and individual artist pieces within it have minimal interpretation so keeping specific focus on the intended concept.

Each artist works had it's own chapter to tell within the overall space but personally if I were to highlight the similarities most artists have used the medium of porcelain, as an encounter for their practise, which is then passed forward for the audience who may be new to contemporary art.

By working in a public space which already has a directed focus means the addition of contemporary art within the venue requires a new audience to engage through the facilitated encounter. This I feel is a value of meadow arts as an organisation,making art not only accessible to all but also engaging a sense of discover through a mutual connection of audience and art.

The show play homage to the skills of historical porcelain work and highlights the need to rescue a trade by raising status of the past worker and giving porcelain a modern value through the contemporary art.

Polly Apfelbaum @ IKON - Second Floor

Waiting for the UFOs (a space set between a landscape and a bunch of flowers)

The exhibition shows a conscious decision to play with the conceptual space of the installation, using the work as architectural barriers. As well as asking the audience to remove there shoes to be able to view the work, this removes a barrier of formalised art, asking the audience to interact with the work in a specific way. Apfelbaums use of hand woven carpets as the focus point attains a conversation of high and low art, crossing boundaries of craft and its value.