David Roberts

The Meaningful Vessel

March 24 - May 3, 2018

David Roberts exhibition at the Galerie de l'Ancienne Poste in 2018

Recognized as the absolute reference for "naked raku" in Europe, English ceramist David Roberts has had few exhibitions in France. However, the artist has made an international name for himself with his large bulbous forms, a purely Western interpretation of the original Japanese tradition.

Born in 1947 in Sheffield, Yorkshire, David Roberts initially trained as an art teacher in the 1960s. He soon developed an interest in ceramics, and in the 70s began to work with raku, a technique that originated in the crafting of tea ceremony vessels in Japan at the end of the 16th century.^e century. Roberts introduced and promoted modern raku in Europe. He also contributed to its reintroduction in the United States, where his example played a major role in the foundation of the "naked raku" movement, so named because of the total absence of glaze on the surface of the clay thus exposed.

David Roberts in Connaissance des Arts

Through his personal exploration of this traditional technique, Roberts has transformed it into a lively, contemporary art form. The process has given him access to pictorial expressions related to the landscape, in particular the hills of his native Yorkshire. These hills, covered with drystone walls, paths and tracks that wind and cross the landscape in all directions, are represented here by the marks created by his drawings and firing processes. These marks of a metaphorical, abstract nature have more recently moved to South Island, New Zealand. During a stay there, the artist was able to observe the consequences of days of torrential rain: huge rocks and mountains rising directly from the inlet to reach heights of over a thousand meters, transformed into a single gigantic and powerful waterfall. The black-and-white linear lines of his latest works in the exhibition, like positive and negative images, echo these outpourings and ripples of water, while the textures represent the erosions and geology of rocks and earth. For the artist, this is a profoundly expressive statement - Roberts' aim is to create new ceramics, with a vision clearly anchored in the 21st century.^e The fifteen works in the exhibition bear witness to this.