In his self-titled exhibition, Matt Wedel presents monumentally sized sculptural ceramics. While teaching at NSCAD University, Wedel utilised the capacity of the university's large-capacity kilns to create figures as high as eight feet. Stylised plant and rock forms, colourfully glazed and inspired by the artist's home landscape of southern California, accompany drawings and over-lifesize ceramic figures of children. While his botanical forms are related to what we know about plants and flowers, they, like the figural works, are large and fluid with simple but powerfully saturated ceramic colour, some as though soaked and dripping with a surreal nectar. Many floral forms are intensely detailed and suggest that they come from places that we do not know, otherworldly products of imagination and desire. They are typically built atop a dynamic crystalline structure. These pediments are frequently over-scaled, dramatic and symbolic: Giotto-esque rock forms that lend an air of the supernatural and heroic to the forms that grace them. This full-colour exhibition brochure features an essay by noted American ceramist Tony Marsh, from Long Beach, California, as well as a text by curator Robin Metcalfe.

Tony Marsh's profile page