“Barbara Gittings’s combination of the ancient techniques of Nerikomi and smoke firing, alongside her unusual modern shapes, places her work in a unique position within the field of Nerikomi ceramics. Japanese Nerikomi often features very regular geometric repetition, whereas Barbara’s work embraces abstraction and asymmetry, while still referencing the geometric.”
Barbara Gittings is a ceramicist best known for her striking smoke-fired Nerikomi porcelain vessels. Contemplative and sensual, they have a sense of calm and serenity that invites the viewer to touch and be drawn into the surface. She embraces inexactness and experimentation in her process, blending precise technique with a loose application. The elemental uncertainty of working with clay, especially the random and uncontrolled shifts and reactions that take place when creating pattern through the clay, is central to her practice. She sees her work as the manifestation of a thousand transitions.
She is fascinated by the geometry in nature, especially as growth and random chaotic forces such as weathering, sedimentation and erosion skew and distort the initial perfect symmetry. Her ceramics are constantly exploring these balances between symmetry and asymmetry, perfection and imperfection, the line between order and chaos and the juxtaposition between control and spontaneity. Nature can be enigmatic and one is instinctively trying to decipher its unknowable qualities. Images and patterns sink into the subconscious, to be released when one engages with the clay and the submerged information emerges to dictate the work in progress.
