'Dream Bardo of Sian’s cactus', Rosa Nguyen, glazed porcelain, combusted vegetal matter, 16.5 x15 x 5cm
Blue Shop Gallery presents
'Celestial Bodies'
Rosa Nguyen | Gallery 1
13th - 30th June 2024
PV Drinks Wednesday 12th June 6-9pm
72 Brixton Road, Oval SW9 6BH
Opening times: Wed-Sun | 11am-6pm
ARTIST TALK | Saturday 22nd June 12-1pm
Rosa Nguyen in conversation with Ocki, Blue Shop Gallery Director
RSVP essential hello@blueshopcottage.com
Ceramic artist Rosa Nguyen (b.1960) is of French Vietnamese parentage and was born in London.
She gained a BA in 3D Design at Middlesex Polytechnic and an MA in ceramics from the Royal College of Art in 1986. She lives and works between London and the South-West of France where she has established a studio and a garden. Rosa Nguyen is a close neighbour of Blue Shop Gallery and her South East London studio neighbours Blue Shop Cottage close to Camberwell College Of Art where she taught 1996-2010 on the celebrated ceramic course.
Rosa works primarily in the field of ceramics, making sculptural objects, vessels, drawings and installations in the form of compositional tableaux.Taking inspiration from the natural world and our holistic relationship with it, Nguyen’s practice is characterised by the incorporation of living and dead botanical form and vegetal matter into her pieces. Assembled and manipulated through casting and preserving in both fired and clay gesso, given new life through dipping in liquid porcelain and sacrificial kiln firings, her glazes in turn fuse the combusted vegetal matter into strange otherworldly forms. With a long-standing interest in Animist and Oriental philosophies and taking inspiration from discrete arts such as gardening , Japanese art of Ikebana flower arranging and astronomy – Rosa’s work evokes a contemplative aesthetic and a deep- rooted spiritual connection with nature.
‘CELESTIAL BODIES’
“Rosa Nguyen is an artist who materialises the ephemeral. Whether this is in memorialising stars that shine bright but are long gone, or immortalising flowers that died far away, across borders, in other soil, her works give tangible form to universal narratives of loss.” - Anna Ricciardi
In her new exhibition ‘Celestial Bodies’ at Blue Shop Gallery, Rosa Nguyen presents a series of cyanotype images alongside porcelain root sculptures and delicate wall assemblages all of which encapsulate the ashes and auras of plants gathered from her garden in France, local parks and gifted by friends. In her most recent series of ‘Celestial bodies’ cyanotypes produced during months of recovery from a long period of Cancer treatment, Rosa uses the process of UV light exposure in the camera-less technique of photography to reveal and capture the ghostly forms and silhouettes of wild floral arrangements created using a collection of her large artist made mouth-blown glass vessels, a garden herbarium and Chinese herbal remedies she took during her clinical treatment.
She describes the process of composing these in the studio at night under red light as part of a ritualistic and performative meditation on the visceral ‘sort of deep scanning’ as a means of connecting the blood, flesh and bone with subtle cosmological energies. By use of stencilled, poured, and dipped washes of coloured ink and clay gesso, over-layering of cellular like dots and textured piercing and stabbings, her glass vessels forms metamorphose into ethereal hybrid bodies teaming with luminous and entangled lifeforms that seemingly float between heaven and earth.
“Rosa Nguyen’s use of ceramic, surface and plants in her work is a true celebration of her humanity and the personal connection she has with the earth, the sun’s light and her own body. Through her study of Ikebana Rosa combines her ceramic vessels with both her hand made mark and her own grown and foraged plants - that have been collated, pressed and driven home from her garden in France - arranged like limbs to symbolise one's own mortal coil whether digesting or dancing to represent us all, a body that has in recent years both failed and saved her when she recovered from Cancer in 2023. Nguyen dips roots and leaves in paints, inks and liquid clay and then uses her mouth-blown borosilicate glass vessels as light lenses through which she makes her cyanotype works on paper before perforating them repeatedly with a sharp tool adding repeated seed like patterns with the same confidence and play that she lifts an enormous pressed leaf from her collection to hold it like a shield in front of her body.”
- Ocki , Blue Shop Gallery Director
Selected Exhibitions - solo
(2019)‘In Praise of Kiku’ White Conduit Project Space
(2014) ‘Sanctuary’ Touchstone gallery, Rochdale
(2013)‘Tree folly with a Cercis’ Garden museum Lambeth, ‘Histoires Naturelles’
(2012) Blås&knåda gallery, Stockholm
(2010) ‘Still Living’ Bristol museum and art gallery
Selected Exhibitions - group
(2023)’Bloom’ York art gallery, York + ‘Forest Wake this Ground’ Arnolfini Gallery
(2022) Bristol ‘Form & Vessel’ Eagle Gallery,London +‘Transports of Delight’ Danielle Arnaud gallery London
(2021)‘Wilder than Wildness itself’ Make - Hauser & Wirth, Somerset
(2019) ‘Backyard Sculpture’ DomoBaal gallery +‘Phytopia’ Glynn Vivian gallery Swansea
(2018) ‘Precious clay’ Royal Worcester museum
(2015) ‘Gardening with Morris’ Compton Verney gallery
(2010) Living wall’ Collect project space, Saatchi Gallery London
Selected Awards & Collections
Rosa won the John Ruskin Art Prize in 2017 for her tableau Gardening with Morris. Her installation projects Gardening with Morris, Tree follies and Living wall were supported by Arts Council awards and her research and collaborations with Japanese Ikebana artists supported by Daiwa foundation and Crafts council awards. Her work can be found in public collections at home and abroad including UK, Sweden, China and Japan. (Public Collections include: Touchstones Museum and Gallery, Rochdale, UK; The Anthony Shaw collection at COCA York Museum, UK; Wison contemporary art museum, Shanghai, China; Maison Patrimoniale de Barthete, France; Shigaraki ceramic museum, Japan; Aberystwyth arts centre, Wales, UK; Crafts Council Collection, London, UK).
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‘From Flying Dragons’, 2021, Rosa Nguyen, Glazed porcelain + combusted botanicals, 38cm x 18cm x 5cm
