Enfilade

My apologies for posting this one so late. I’m afraid this is the last weekend. -CH

From The Holburne Museum:

Bouke De Vries: War & Pieces
The Holburne Museum, Bath, 1 September — 2 December 2012

Bouke de Vries, War & Pieces, installation at
The Holburne Museum, Bath, 2012

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Ceramic artist Bouke de Vries has created a unique contemporary installation on the Holburne’s Ballroom table. His work is inspired by the eighteenth-century fashion for decorating banqueting tables with extravagant porcelain and sugar sculptures, War & Pieces draws on the tradition of grand banquets and balls held on the eve of battle.

The centre-piece is a dramatic atomic-bomb mushroom cloud made using shards of white ceramics, old and new, around which the table is set with an intervention incorporating Sir William Holburne’s Chinese tobacco-leaf pattern dinner service. A battle will be fought out along the table with figures derived from 1770s Derby porcelain, some of which have mutated into cyborgs using elements from plastic toys – a new and contemporary material fighting to defeat the forces of sugar and ceramic.