Kristin Burgham

Kristin Burgham is an artist working with industrial ceramic production processes and found objects. Her constructed ceramic assemblages reveal the legacy of unknown makers. Her works reveal process, practice and production by tracing making lines to expose the act of production and make the invisible visible. She explores the notion of time and the trajectory of skills. Her process starts with complex mould making and results in constructed porcelain clay imbued with colour and memory. Burgham has a studio in South Melbourne,Victoria. Her works are held in the public collections of the NGV, Ballarat Art Gallery, Shepparton Art Museum and Coffs Harbour Regional Gallery. 

The vision for my art is to create conscious presence through multi-perspectival ambiguity. My background as an architect and inventor trained my brain in abstractions - flipping from plan, section, to detail - often within the same drawing. Our collective perception is equally being re-trained by the plethora of images that we consume through social media and other channels – from first person drone view, to the microscopic, portrait, and celestial images from satellites. This rapid shift in viewpoints I call the ‘perspectival flip’, our cognitive ability to quickly switch perception and understanding as new images present. Humans are uncannily good at pattern recognition, but we often get this wrong as we try to understand the world. This is called Pareidolia – seeing patterns where they don’t exist, such as a rabbit in the clouds. My art pushes into this realm, exploring ambiguity and unknowing, a uniquely human quandary explored by philosophers for millennia. I play with misperception, each viewer brings different readings to an artwork, adding to something of themselves in engagement with the artwork. My art begins with gestural abstraction as floor drawing, creating consciously but without intention, making space for what arises. For me, each drawing contains ‘perspectival flips’, a reading that shifts from topographic, to elevational, to portrait, etcetera. I then lean into these ambiguities in my collaboration with a 3D digital cutting machine, abstracting the original floor drawings into mixed media artworks. By working with the machine as an extension of myself and working consciously, I allow for a new artwork to arise. This is often a compounding of ‘flips’, creating ambiguity and conscious moments of contemplation. In this conscious engagement with ambiguity, and the digital and analogue tools that I use, I find presence. Moments of contemplation in engagement with the artworks. It is this presence that I seek to share in my ambiguous ‘perspectival flip’ artworks. An engagement with the moment, a recognition of unknowing, a connection to our human condition.

NEWS ABOUT THE ARTIST

FOLLOW US

OPENING HOURS
Wednesday - Friday 12:00 - 5:00 pm
Saturday 12.00 - 4.00 pm
Other times by appointment

We acknowledge the traditional custodians of the land on which we live and work– the Gadigal/Bidjigal people of the Eora Nation. We pay respects to their elders past, present and emerging.