Dense and dynamic, this most recent body of work signals a departure from Alistair Blair’s signature delicate and controlled porcelain ware. Under the apprenticeship of South Africa’s renowned porcelain master, Katherine Glenday, Blair has perfected his wheel-throwing techniques and worked over several years to form the perfect moon jar. These rugged, naked stoneware vessels eschew, though never wholeheartedly, clay’s traditional ties to functionality, favouring expressiveness over utility. With their elemental and irregular dynamism, they flout the symmetry we have come to expect from the potter’s wheel.

Formally, Blair’s sculptural abstractions pay homage to the Japanese primitivist ceramics of the 1950s and their contemporary forms. Defining (2022), which recalls Akiyama Yō’s kokuto (lit. “black fire”) pieces, resembles a rough-hewn hunk of wood early on in the process of being whittled down by chisel and mallet. Does the sky touch the ground? (2022), on the other hand, recalls the anthropomorphic silhouettes of Shozo Michikawa’s vessels. Decidedly corporeal, its sinewy swoops approximate the human torso in motion, while a vertical fracture running the length of the vessel hints at its shadowy interior: the enigmatic human spirit, perhaps? Blair’s vessels have been abstracted to the degree that they resemble everything and nothing, all at once. They invite seemingly endless comparisons. They are like portable mountains, attesting to the violence of earth’s tectonics, or like maquettes of the dynamic architecture of Santiago Calatrava, like Frank Gehry and Zaha Hadid, only less garish, or chunks of marble on their way to becoming a Brâncuși bird. The works are neither functional nor representational. They are the products of Blair’s extensive rumination on the human condition, haikus in clay.

The essential nature of the clay has not been subordinated to Blair’s technical mastery; rather, his vessels convey a sense of collaboration between medium and artist. Like the grain of wood or the crystalline structures of minerals, they appear as though arranged according to some sacred geometry. A raw, elemental quality asserts itself as the hand of the maker recedes. They appear as if they have always been, and yet never were.