Sally Walk

Alluring and unlikely, Sally Walk's new body of work aims its technical virtuosity at the goal of imperfection, modulating between strangeness and recognisability across a series of wry ceramic forms.

Sally Walk has spent over twenty-five years in clay: working (with) it, shaping it, and sounding the outer reaches of its formal and expressive potential. Often, her work has comprised intricate, richly glazed, and delicate forms. They have been occasionally “organic” in their shape and pattern, but with a distinct kind of perfection about them: completeness, wholeness, resolution, the improbability of their colours. Her most recent body of work, shown now in Relinquished Control, responds to the contingency and claustrophobia of the past two years, and the often-eerie sense of a promised return to “normality” on the horizon. Now, Walk delights in asymmetry and the impossibly imbalanced, in the decentred and beguiling, and in a rich textural vocabulary. 

In Positively alternate, 2022, mountains or molehills bubble up to the surface of the clay vessel, pulling the soft roundness we might expect of such an object into much more seductive and confusing territory. There is something topographical, too, in the rhythm of the glazed linework, forming as it does a field of trippy concentric loops, like elevation markings on a good map. It’s natural, somehow, to reach for “organic” as a descriptor for this object, and indeed for the materials in which it’s crafted, though the organic does not necessarily overlap, entirely, with the comfortable or comforting. A feeling of being off-kilter, or of being pulled into multi-perspectival dizziness, lends the work a sense of dazzling strangeness. 

So, these works in clay are unsettling, and they are organic. Through the historical and cultural entanglements of their materials, though, they’re also human: it’s difficult to think of ceramic work without thinking of kitchens, dining rooms, or the home, just as it is to think about clay without remembering where we human beings came from, in many accounts. In catalogue text for this exhibition, Walk explains that she is “forever trying to understand [her] place in the world and so [her] work is very much a symbolic discovery of self.” Colour symbolism across this body of work, for instance, reflects many qualities of this human “self,” with black, especially, being used to figure strength and determination. 

These works attest to the value of imperfection – indeed, to the deep recognisability and rightness of it. Perhaps what feels “strange” and strangely charming in these pieces is also a strangeness which inheres in ourselves, both artist and audience alike. Accomplishment and technical virtuosity are totally continuous, in Walk’s new work, with this kind of weird, recognisable just-off-ness. Indeed, they are indispensable in its delivery. Both inviting and confounding, these are forms to be taken to heart.

EXHIBITION
Sally Walk: Relinquished Control
2–24 April 2022
James Makin Gallery, Melbourne