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Plastic Arts, PET plastics, enamel paint, permanent marker, 2009. Photo: Michael Myers.
Sarah Goffman is an Australian contemporary artist whose works often involve her reuse of everyday consumable items, transforming discarded objects into socially engaged installations and assemblages.
Her new work, Plastic Arts (2009) presents a conundrum of material concerns and economies, and a challenge to the presumption of linear design evolution. These vessels and ornaments in blue and white do not merely juxtapose traditional aesthetics against contemporary forms, they also force a consideration of the familiar within a complex matrix of values. Last September I saw a retrospective exhibition According to What? by Chinese artist Ai Weiwei at the Mori Art Museum in Tokyo. There, his Neolithic earthenware vases dipped in house-paint that dried in dribbles over ancient red clay, were clustered on a low plinth adjacent to three famous large-scale photographs of the artist dropping a Han Dynasty vase on the ground. Where Ai Weiwei questions the status and meaning of objects of enormous cultural value by inserting, modifying and sometimes destroying them within a contemporary moment, Goffman’s far more materially humble practice reflects and abstracts these same concerns with trademark humour and gentle, formal arrangements.
The amazing transformation from cheap plastic to imitative expensive earthenwares was what brought my attention to her works. Artist's works has a deep cultural inquiry which is not the focus of my project. However, the aesthetics as well as the defamiliarized everyday objects is a god reference for the project. Turning cheap disposable plastic commodities into classy art with just the use of markers and white enamel , represents the availability of the expensive ceramic art for the general public , epitomizes some kind of utopian dream too.
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