Glenn Barkley

My name is Glenn Barkley. I'm an artist based on Gadigal land in Sydney and also working on the lands of many nations on the south coast, the Shoalhaven of New South Wales. I wanted to be part of the exhibition Kerameikos, because I'm a bit obsessed with the Chau Chak Wing Museum and before that, the Nicholson Museum. I spend a lot of time there. It's probably my favorite museum in Sydney, and I visit there sometimes when I'm not sure of what direction my work can take, because I always know there's something new there from the past. Funnily enough, something new, is quite often something old, and there's so many works there that I have used as the basis of my work.

Things that resonate with me from the collection are ceramics from the past, the Greek collections, the Egyptian collections of pottery. They're things that I look at all the time, but I also know that there's things in storage that I sort of longed to get my hands on. So the Billies and Charlie's in particular. I'm also interested in the Egyptian ears that exist and those things really resonate within my work.  

This exhibition has been a way to expand my practice.The opportunity to get into the storage, to look at works from the past, to handle things, remind you that with ceramics in particular, the past is always right there, and that the makers of hundreds and thousands of years ago quite often are looking over your shoulder. And, it reminds you that you're part of a continuum of practice. 

I continue to go to the museum, I've had a look around, looking at other objects while I've been installing last week, and there was a couple of pots that I saw there in a completely different way, and that will drive me to go into the studio and start to make new work.  

I think if there's any details in my work that I want people to look at, it's this idea of the micro and the macro. So, I've made an installation which is a large roundel which is on the wall, but from afar it just like colored dots or forms on the wall. But when you get up close to them, you can see that they are referencing ancient coins that I have made casts from, from casts within the Chau Chak Wing Museum collection. Then those coins are repeated on some of the pots, and again, you can sort of look in really close, and it's one of those things that I really do love about ceramics is you can look at the form as a whole from a macro, but then as you get closer and closer and closer, you can see all these details and materials, which I find endlessly compelling.

One of the forms that I reference quite a lot in my work is the famous Portland Vase, which is based on a glass vase that is in the British Museum, then remade by Wedgwood, and then, in a way, remade by me. So I quite often use this idea of the copy or the cover version to make works, because I think pottery is quite often a history of imitation, and the way that forms are changed, modified and copied across time is something that I think is at the heart of ceramic practice. 

And I also want people to think about objects and how they arrived in the museum. What are the stories of those objects? How do they exist? What do they tell us about past practices, and what do they tell us about what museums can do better in the future?