A Dreaming of the Shires (Creamware Blue 1)

Jack Ky Tan, A Dreaming of the Shires (Creamware Blue 1), 2023
Glazed  porcelain
10.5 x 30 x 11 cm approx.
Unique work
Signed and numbered certificate

Standard Price £750 *
Patron’s Price £675 **

* Edition prices will increase as they sell out.

** Patron’s price is available to those who support Camden Art Centre via our Patron and Young Patron scheme. For further information please click here.

This edition has been produced on the occasion of Jack Ky Tan  Ceramics Fellowship at Camden Arts Centre in 2023.

About the work
Tan’s new body of work arises from his studio residency at Camden Art Centre 2022/23 and has been considering ideas of mourning, innocence and experience, the colonial imagination and belonging. Drawing on his own cultural heritages as his points of departure, Tan’s research has been focused on the legacies of British colonialism in South and Southeast Asia with a particular interest in the use of nostalgia within stories, objects, memories, language, and literature to create the English-enculturated colonial native.

A Dreaming of the Shires (Creamware Blue) references the English faux porcelain ‘creamware’ ceramics of the late 1700s to mid 1800s, most notably made for Queen Charlotte and Catherine the Great. Using a white ‘slip’ (liquid clay), Tan has cast reproductions of a shire horse, an object of colonial nostalgia and symbolic of an English imaginary for the artist. However, unlike perfectly cast creamware pottery, Tan’s objects eroded and broke the mould from which they were cast with each pouring, creating unique works. Subsequently decorated in Tang dynasty ‘sancai’ glazes using a cobalt blue-splash method from the era, the work invites questions about the nature of mimesis and reproduction, particularly with regard to memory, identity, ideals and cultural symbols.

About the work
Jack Ky Tan (b.1971, Singapore) is an interdisciplinary artist based in Galloway, Southwest Scotland. Working across, performance, sculpture, law and policy-making, his practice is an ongoing exploration of social justice that blurs the boundaries between, art, law, governance, and consultancy. Interrogating the legacies of colonialism with a particular interest in the Maritime South East Asian diaspora, Tan looks toward alternative cosmologies and knowledge systems that predate the Judaeo-Christian and colonial narratives. Questioning these embedded structures in our society and economies which form our laws and guide our behaviour, his work attempts to rethink our entanglement with the human and non-human world and look towards alternative ways of living and working.

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