Windless Night
Fortyfive Downstairs, Melbourne, AU16 - 27 June, 2026
Exhibition Statement
Daydream transports the dreamer outside the immediate world to a world that bears the mark of infinity.
– Gaston Bachelard
“Windless Night” centers on a body of ceramic sculptures that take inspiration from the stillness, light and movement of the night sky, as well as archetypal landmarks that have helped many a wayward traveler orient themself in space. Most were created at a time when I was in need of orientation, in the years after I re-located to Melbourne, Wurundjeri land, from my home country of the US.
Though united by recurring motifs – of clouds, “beacons,” the stars and moon – I began few of these sculptures from images, and most from the assemblage of abstract shapes and the confluence of fluid lines. Thus they are as much a product as an inner vision as an outer one. They as much reference old archetypes of way-finding as they are to modernist models of compositional unity.
In “Poetics of Space,” Gaston Bachelard proposes “a concordance of world immensity with intimate depths of being,” noting the work of poets whose contemplation of vast expanses becomes a meditation on the depths of themselves. That duality of the intimate and the immense is alive in this work, with its echoes both of the moon’s reflected light and the impressions of my hands, and the incisions of my tools, upon the clay.
Final image by George Jefford; all others by Kate Butler