Honor Freeman: all that was solid is liquid

Honor Freeman’s ceramic artworks are inspired by the everyday as she explores the human body and its relationship to domestic and utilitarian objects. Her realistic and lifelike porcelain works are both luscious and repellent as they evoke ideas of bodily boundaries, cleanliness, containment, seepage, and ooze.

Working from her home studio on South Australia’s Fleurieu Peninsula, artist Honor Freeman draws her inspiration from family, domestic objects, and the remnants and detritus of everyday life. Her delicate and life-like porcelain pieces mirror the day-to-day as she explores the human relationship to the familiar and ordinary.

Freeman works between craft and contemporary art as she seeks to examine and reveal the edges and boundaries of the body. Trained at Adelaide’s Jam Factory, she did not pursue the path of functional and decorative object making, rather she was drawn to exploring what it means to have a body and notions of seepage or imperfection. She says that, “I work with the idea of repulsion, creating objects that represent cleanliness, containment and rupture—it’s a gentle kind of body horror, if there’s such a thing.”

She is well known for her assemblages of ceramic soaps, groupings of realistic half-used bars which have been sourced from her past work cleaning motels, and gifted from friends and family members. These castings of discarded and half-used soaps evoke an uneasy tension between finely crafted compelling pieces and the objects that they were cast from. In a gallery setting they are presented as a tableau or pile of semi-precious items, with each piece coloured in pale greens, pinks, yellows, and ivory. They are tactile and tempting, as the viewer strains to look closely at the cracks and chinks that have been worn away by the close contact of washing the body.

Freeman’s studio is testament to her probing and inquisitive nature, surrounding herself with explorations and experiments into material and techniques. Most recently she has been casting used chewing gum, with her two children delighting in the opportunity to be the chewers and crafters of these abject marble-sized objects. Coloured in her trademark muted tones, the porcelain gum are formed into a stack entitled Pieces of you, 2023, resembling a termite mound or a strange unknown bubbling disease. This is playful work, yet also repellent and reminiscent of the sensation of finding a hard bit of chewed and discarded gum stuck under a seat or table.

Scattered around the studio space are other familiar objects cast in porcelain—hot water bottles, sponges, flannels, buckets, and bath plugs. These are all utilitarian and banal signifiers of everyday life, yet for Freeman they become explorations of form, texture, material, and colour. She is fascinated by objects and substances that ooze and emanate from human domesticity or that engage or are in contact with the body. Like the chewing gum, she is interested in the leakages of the body, how saliva and teeth can transform something, and how these processes can make us feel uncomfortable or queasy.

A current preoccupation is working with opalescent glaze and applying this to a series of new pillow castings. This bringing together of the soft with the hard and the luster of pearl embodies Freeman’s approach to materiality with her saying, “I am excited by making a material behave in an unexpected way to fool and tempt you. For clay to have that type of magic and alchemy.” Until they are glazed, these pillows sit scattered around the studio, tempting the visitor to rest their head on the matt whiteness or feel the deceptive pillowy softness.

Amongst all of these domestic objects sits a foaming yellow substance, appearing like a shape-shifting interloper on shelving, tables, and benchtops. This is Freeman at her most playful, releasing commercial expanding foam, casting it, and transforming it into effervescent organic forms. Not only is this the result of a period of research and development, it is also preparation for her upcoming exhibition all that was solid is liquid at Sabbia Gallery in Sydney.

For this solo exhibition Freeman will be presenting familiar works such as the soaps and the sponges together with the chewing gum and other new pieces. These will be presented on plinths and other traditional exhibition formats. However, Freeman is looking beyond the gallery space into its fabric and structure. Sabbia Gallery is housed in the former Hordern and Co stables with remnants of its former life—original piers, beams, and façade—still visible and on show.

Freeman is interested to explore these aspects of the space and to seek out the joins and cracks, where the outside seeps into the interior. This is where she envisages the expanding foam forming part of the exhibition, as a filler and infiltrator of these in between spaces. She is thankful for the support of the gallery, who are providing her the space to present her completed works but to also experiment and explore beyond the confines of the white walls.

With a busy schedule of family life, caring for a significant vegetable garden, running art projects at her children’s school, and exploring techniques in her studio, Freeman knows that the exhibition is coming up quickly. She is almost there but is not quite ready to put aside her focus on experimentation. Freeman is an artist who is highly process driven, she is fascinated by the alchemy and investigation of working as a ceramic artist. From sourcing found objects through to manipulating materials, Freeman aims to create a seamless connection between her studio practice and what is presented to the public within the gallery space.

This article was originally published in Artist Profile, issue 68 

EXHIBITION
Honor Freeman: all that was solid is liquid
2 – 26 October 2024
Sabbia Gallery, Sydney