【Profile】
-Casey Chen-
Casey Chen is a practicing artist based in Sydney's inner west, having graduated last year from the National Art School with a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree and majoring in ceramics.
Chen was awarded the annual Harvey Galleries National Art School Exhibition award in 2020 as a recipient among a group of fellow graduating artists and his first solo exhibition ‘Lazy Dynamite’ was in March this year at Bathurst Regional Art Gallery.
What inspired you to make this kind of work, and when did you start making it?
――I had always imagined I would have done printmaking at art school and instead I wound up picking ceramics. I’ve always preferred to draw rather than sculpt or paint and up to that point I’d only made things in clay in high school. But uni was the first time I’d thrown pottery on a wheel before and I was keen to bring that into my art practice and just draw and paint on pots.
The mix of folklore, mythology, and pop culture is an interesting combination, why this combination?
――I like reading about folklore and mythology, they’re timeless stories that are familiar and well loved with most people and make cool narrative devices to illustrate. These stories are often picked up and retold every now and again in pop culture and I think that’s because they’re enduring tales that people are fond of sharing.
Do you use ceramics that you made yourself? If so, do you make the pottery based on the design of the painting or do you think of the painting based on the pottery?
――I make the pottery myself either from using molds or throwing a plate or a pot on a pottery wheel. I make the painting based on the pottery after it’s been made. I normally pick a design that I like and work on it in photoshop before deciding to paint it on a vessel.
There is a lot of Ukiyo-e in your work, does this have anything to do with your own culture or your inspiration?
――I think Ukiyo-e is incredibly enduring as art and this ties into its appeal to me as art and its accessibility to audiences as being contemporary. It’s definitely my biggest form of inspiration along with older examples of Chinese and Japanese porcelain that inform themes and motifs in my work.
Could you please talk a bit more about how Ukiyoe is inspiring you and other things that are inspiring you if there is any.
――Ukiyoe is a major inspiration and I like how broad in scope and rich the range of works are. I also look at a lot of existing examples of porcelain as inspiration and think a lot about their shapes and designs. I feel like historically in ceramics it’s encouraged to adapt many existing styles into your practice and I try and do that with my work by adopting and using many visual techniques from pots and vases that I’ve seen.
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