Collection: Rosie McLachlan

My ceramic works are wood fired over 4 days and nights in an anagama kiln, an ancient type of pottery kiln brought to Japan from China via Korea in the 5th century. The long firing process is a devotional act, and the resulting sculptural works, transformed by heat, flame and ash accretions, have an elemental, totem-like quality. 

Author and curator Stephen Ellcock writes, Rosie’s work references ancient traditions of funerary art, drawing upon her in-depth research into comparative mythology and pan-global cosmologies. At first glance these ceramics may appear to be familiar-looking souvenirs of a mythic, imperfect past, objects created with some inexplicable ritual purpose in mind, but the closer one looks the more alien and disconcerting the works appear, resembling nothing less than relics of a civilisation not yet born: fieldwork for future archaeology.