"This Time it's Personal" New Work by Christine Thacker

Artist Statement

This Time It's Personal

Several of the images on these pots are puzzling but they are not used in order to puzzle. Sometimes when travelling through rural or industrial landscapes I see buildings with clear purpose but I dont know what that purpose is. So I use these images, including the animals and figures, to express that state of looking but seeing only half of the picture, of half understanding something.

The background for all the imagery is the landscape and the sea, particularly distant views and the far-away hills because these add a picture of time. Anything drawn in the foreground is much younger (as an idea), and closer to us in time than those painted hills.

I find it helpful to refer to the vast body of symbolic meanings.

For example I have used the image of smoke. It is ephemeral and evocative in the landscape. These days we see smoke in the sky as atmospheric filth. In the symbolic realm smoke can represent a conduit between Earth and Heaven. It is evidence that the house is alive and breathing. There was an Irish druid credited with being able to diagnose illness in the house by reading the smoke. Then again it may be a blazing old pottery kiln, full of painted jugs and vases.

Having crossed the Hauraki Gulf for the past 25 years, islands disappearing and hoving into sight and the ups and downs of the smooth or churning sea collect in my personal image bank. The sea tiles do not depict any place I have seen, more just the experience of being at sea in sight of land as it recedes or looms.

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