Certain Times XXIV (2019)

The Contemporary Art Society’s Jackson Tang Ceramic Award is a fund focussed on ceramics. Designed to support a major acquisition of ceramic work for a Museum Member, the award is open to artists whose primary material is ceramic, as well as those who only employ the process and material occasionally. This new award allows the Contemporary Art Society to acknowledge the current intense interest in ceramics from artists approaching the medium from a variety of different backgrounds. Applications were invited from both Fine Art and Omega Fund curators. Through the Jackson Tang Ceramic Award, the Contemporary Art Society has acquired Lubna Chowdhary’s Certain Times XXIV for Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery.

Lubna Chowdhary’s shaped tiles, sculptural objects and spatial installations in ceramic constitute a distinctive oeuvre that bridges the disciplines of architecture, craft, design, sculpture and painting. Her colour-rich body of work explores and celebrates the plurality of our built environment. Histories of material culture and cross‐cultural confluence are examined to generate new forms that resist easy classification.

Her heritage – born in Tanzania to Pakistani parents who emigrated to the industrial north of England in the 1970s – brings with it the memory of richly designed spaces and diverse architectural landscapes. Subverting the traditional use of clay, Chowdhary merges ideas and aesthetics from Eastern and Western cultures to address the relationship between them.

The tableau Certain Times XXIV evokes the characteristically hybrid architecture of Asian and South Asian cities, their informal conjunctions of tradition and modernity, and the rational and spiritual. The work recalls a view of a distant cityscape, a world captured in space and existing across time. It brings together multiple, overlapping and intimately installed two‐dimensional forms that are often metaphorical, but sometimes reference memories of real objects, buildings and places. Special attention is paid to constructing, accumulating and composing elements. Their vibrant glazed surfaces carry the softness and irregularity of hand glazing which contrasts sharply with the technologically precise cut of the ceramic forms.

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