Chester Nealie

Placing Nealie's works amongst items from his own collection, Bathurst Regional Art Gallery's Etched in Fire conjures a broad vision of ceramic practice which remains, nevertheless, attentive to the local environment in regional New South Wales, which Nealie has called home for decades.

Next to his home in Goanna Ridge, Gulong, is Chester Nealie’s kiln. A few hours’ drive from Bathurst, where his works are currently shown, Nealie lives in concert and collaboration with the natural features of his property. Having moved to Australia from his native New Zealand originally in 1991, Nealie has made a home in regional New South Wales from which he draws the visual inspiration, and the constitutive materials, for his works. In a documentary film shown alongside his ceramic works at Bathurst, Nealie explains that he uses fallen trees on his property to fire his wood kiln. In another shot, he kneels next to a section of rock covered in lichen, touching it gently, speaking softly. He explains that the patterning, dapples, and organic weirdness of form that he sees in the lichen often appear on his ceramic vessels. So, too, do imprints from found shells and ash-marks that the local wood leaves in Nealie’s glazes as it burns. 

Though the marks of the local are made upon Nealie’s work, a peripatetic career as both and artist and an educator has also shaped his vessels. Nealie often experiments with the Japanese method of shino glazing as well as Japanese firing techniques, having lived in Japan amid stints in Korea, Norway, and the United States. In this way, his work can take the local seriously without becoming myopic: one eye is always on the horizon. 

Nealie comments that his ceramics retain an ‘essence of wobbliness’ – a characterful asymmetry which renders them, in his mind, like their maker. Indeed, he thinks of many of his works as figurative, in an oblique way; though they may, most obviously, be vases or teapots or bottles, their gestural shapes allow flashes of emotion, expression, and personality to come through. This show, containing the work of some six decades alongside the artist’s own personal collection of objects and artefacts, places a local practitioner within a global context, both art-historically and biographically. This work of placement  is a fitting mirror to Nealie’s treatment of ceramics, which, in a parallel motion, locates ceramic practice within the broader field of figuration, and indeed of expressive (perhaps even Expressionist) artmaking. 

EXHIBITION
Chester Nealie: Etched in Fire
5 June – 25 July 2021
Bathurst Regional Art Gallery, NSW