Still lives

Object 3: The emotionally-charged object

Hermie Cornelisse's ceramics and textiles transport the viewer to her childhood kitchen. In Still Lives she presents a series of box-shaped vessels and a large textile d'oyley, each featuring details drawn from a memory of an object used by her family. Her use of decoration on the surface of the ceramic vessels and on the Self Functioning D'oyley mimic the mechanically produced patterns found on domestic textiles and surfaces. However, Cornelisse's use of a hand-drawn line to reiterate these patterns in glaze, or hand-stitched appliqué and quilting to re-create them in cloth, remind the viewer of the irregularity of recall - that memories are a shifting and imprecise version of past events and entities. The sense of a loving, although not necessarily nostalgic, reconstruction of objects from a childhood kitchen is also conveyed through the irregular box forms: sides of the box vessels are slightly off-square, handles are at differing heights and the lips of the Box Jugs are but gentle creases. The works seems to bear evidence of use through these formal irregularities as well as through the artist's use of pale, muted colours, as if worn by years of daily handling.

• Hermie Cornelisse
• Box Jugs 2004
• Ceramics

There is something simultaneously familiar and unfamiliar in Cornelisse's work. Her use of pattern and colour is immediately recognisable as domestic, quotidian, and of a previous time and place. It is the combination of these elements that creates a tension in the viewer's experience of the work; the works allude to objects and spaces which are immediately accessible through memory, yet ultimately rendered untouchable by the passage of time. Cornelisse's objects gently play on this temporal and emotional paradox. The works deftly illustrate the power of objects to act as vehicles for memory and feeling - objects as entities capable of transporting the viewer back to a point of origin, complete with emotional response, a bitter-sweet journey bringing reconnection with a past but also an acute sense of distance and displacement.

• Al Munro
• From the catalogue essay Of lives and objects still
• March 2004

• Hermie Cornelisse
• Left to right:
  Footed Box 2004, Potato Box 2004, Self-Functioning D'oyley 2004, Box Basket 2004, Box Jugs 2004, Box Basket 2004
• Ceramics and textile

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