Ceramicist Agalis Manessi grew up in Corfu, an island steeped in the kaleidoscopic colours of its flora and fauna and an ancient history of making with clay. Her whimsical pieces continue to draw inspiration from a colourful menagerie of sources and inspiration, from close observation of nature to paintings by the Renaissance masters such as Lucas Cranach and Pisanello. Manessi has the patient eye and the sensitivity to colour of a painter, and art abounds in all of her works. Look closely at her animal figurines - leaping hares, winking cats and floppy-eared dogs - and you might notice the swirling flowers of Gustav Klimt or the ebullient planes of colour in Fauvist painter Franz Marc's work. Her painted plates and figures, meanwhile, reference history and literature more directly. Each plate and figure is handbuilt, the softly pinched surface providing a supple canvas for portraits of historical figures, such as medieval abbess and composer Hildegard von Bingen.
The emphasis on the painted surface lies within the tradition of Maiolica, a technique that dates back to ancient Mesopotamia and has survived through millenia thanks to its expressive, painterly potential. Manessi pinches and forms her plates and figures out of lumps of raw terracotta, the traces of her making visible on the clay's surface. The fired pieces are then dipped into a glazing solution whose key ingredient, tin oxide, gives Maiolica pieces their characteristic white finish. This becomes a blank canvas for Manessi's imagination in a decorative technique which converges somewhere between chemistry and painting. Her motifs are painted with a mixture of metal oxides, which react under the molten temperatures of the kiln and transform into lustrous cobalt blues, peachy pinks and lemon yellows.
Her rosy, pastel palate belies an enigmatic quality to Manessi's work. Her shape-shifting animal figurines morph from owls into cats and from cats into rose gardens on a whim, their multiple faces painted with mischievous smiles. With her painter's touch, clay leaps into life.
See all available works by Agalis Manessi in the gallery and online.
