Porcelain

Rachel Kneebone’s finely sculpted porcelain works erupt with a bacchanal of contorted bodies, limbs and slumped phallic tendrils that emerge from amorphous properties of the material. Sharing the characteristics of Hellenistic sculpture, Kneebone retains the purity of the glazed white surface while the tonal chiaroscuro enhances the intricately modeled ruptures and crevices that inject this conventional material with a sensual physicality and unique energy.

Inspired by Ovid’s great poem ‘Metamorphosis’ where humans migrate into a myriad of forms, Kneebone depicts an erotic state of flux, suspended mid-transition, divulging part figurative and fragmentary motifs. Kneebone’s eclectic vision relishes in the angst of both Greek tragedies and Bernini, the hybrid creatures of Bosch, and the ‘erotic gaze’ of Batialle and Bellmer. A more direct comparison is with the eighteenth century Meissen porcelain tableaux, some of which were copied from idyllic pastoral paintings and odalisques by Watteau and Boucher. Yet Kneebone manages to decant all these influences into her own highly distinct rhetoric, celebrating forms of transgression, beauty and seduction.