A Common Thread
A Common Thread artist biographies and statements
Harriet Mckay
Biography
Harriet McKay completed a Bachelor of Contemporary Arts at the University of South Australia in 2018 where she was awarded the John Christie Wright Memorial Prize. In 2019 McKay curated her first exhibition ‘Essential Forms’ at GAGPROJECTS | Greenaway Art Gallery.
Artist Statement
It has been a rough year for both Sam and I, and making these works together has been a way of breathing through it. Playing with the weight and thickness of felt, hand-drying calico, colouring in with texta’s and hand-dying with natural inks were the methods which I used to make these works, all very slowly in my garden at home. Their softness reminds me of the grace and warmth of my grandmother. And I am reminded again, materials are significant for the histories they hold.
Sam Gold
Biography
Sam Gold is currently a ceramic associate at the JamFactory who works primarily as a ceramic sculptor. Gold produces ceramic installations that were initially informed by her training as an Art Therapist and Furniture maker.
Artist Statement
Gold explores the body’s faculty for Poiesis in order to achieve meaning and its capacity to reconcile with material to achieve catharsis. This processed oriented work is held together by the indexical trace of gesture; the repetitious markmaking which is embedded within the clay. Gold’s body is a tool, the clay becomes a site to document time and experiential narratives of what we birth, rise and give death to.
Gold speaks of the ‘storiness’ of our lived materiality - The artefacts we imbue with meaning, with loves and losses, with hopes and desperations. The conferring of emotion, tales of times lived into the material, is an essentially human and revealing act.