Mark Thompson - Stephen Bowers - Earthenware | Painting - Friday 21 February - Saturday 15 March 2025

All that Glisters…

Lark’s Tongues in Aspic (Part V)

When you have seen one bird, you have not seen them all. E.O. Wilson

Time’s arrow carries knowledge in its fletching: What bird’s feather primed it? What quill and colour? Brian Castro, Chinese Postman.

I live and work in Norwood, South Australia. Birds alight a lot in my work and I blame it on the fact that I grew up in bushland. We lived right on the edge of suburban Sydney in the 1950s. Beyond the back fence it was all creek and bushland. At night, apart from the glow from our back veranda, you would rarely see another light. Though all that beautiful bushland has long gone, it was then largely intact and I spent my childhood with the bush on my doorstep.

I was surrounded by birds and bush animals, observing them in the wild and hand-rearing them as pets. Birds (particularly cockatoos and parrots) came to roost in my work, recalled from field observation and sketches, photos and identification manuals. I especially liked paintings by John James Audubon, Elizabeth Gould, Neville Cayley, Ellis Rowan and William T Cooper. I am influenced by these and many other bird and natural history illustrators. Bird imagery in visual art and craft has a long pedigree – plenty to see and study: Egyptian wall murals, Chinese scroll painting, Greek pottery, Persian and Mughal painting, English transfer-ware, etc.

My work is influenced a lot by study of historical blue and white pottery, textiles, wallpaper and book illustration. It often explores – sometimes obliquely, sometimes directly – ideas of pattern-in-nature and nature-in-pattern and reflects on the tensions that underlie how we impact on the natural world.

Environmental destruction alarmed me as a child and it has only gotten worse, which is why fragmentation, segmentation, shadow and disjuncture are visual themes within my work. In some works in this exhibition, disintegration and atomisation has infected even the birds themselves.

I paint directly onto the surface, building up images in layers of coloured clays or ‘slips’, on which detailed line-work is added before it is covered by a clear glaze. I work in a more or less ‘spontaneous’ way – with a composition in mind but making things up as I go along. I take liberties with colour – one has to – as firing at high temperature restricts what colours can be used.

In addition to birds, foliage and other natural history subjects, I may also use geometric borders and patterns.

Firing fuses clay, colours and glaze into a solid piece of pottery, which makes concrete sense of the old saying, a bird in the hand…

I see birds symbolically. Peter Brook and Jean-Claude Carrière adapted Attar’s The Conference of the Birds into a play titled La Conférence des Oiseaux which they published in 1979.

‘What shadow is ever separated from its maker? Do you see?
The shadow and its maker are one and the same, so get over surfaces and delve into mysteries’ **

** The Conference of the Birds by Attar, edited and translated by Sholeh Wolpé, W. W. Norton & Co 2017 ISBN 0393292193

Photography by Grant Hancock & Stephen Bowers