Katherine Glenday’s virtuosic control of the medium gives rise to a paradoxical relinquishing. Her vessels drop out of an ongoing exchange between the hands and the clay and the fire of the kiln. Without being reduced to symbol, the skins and material resonances of porcelain act as entry points into the rest of the world. The vessel becomes a literal echo chamber for light and sound, stillness and movement, the unsaid conversation, and the echoes that locate and outlast it. The artist has alternatively described her use of porcelain as “painting with light” – the lightwaves, the sea in Kalk Bay, and the waves of sound and silence too. Sound is a sensory experience that does not allow us to choose or turn away. At least more than touching and seeing – the world of the auditory moves through us without any concern for illusions of autonomy or separateness within a skin. Reinstating a porousness that was always there, many of Glenday’s vessels literally act as gongs for sounding out and filling shared space. Exceeding the borders of their visible “selves”, these resonant forms allow us to wonder, without language, what it might mean to find one’s own shape or voice, without possibly turning away from the plurality of voices that move through each of us.

Although defined by multiple voices and material resonances across four decades, Glenday’s practice might still be described as strongly autobiographical. In moths, light and resonance, we encounter a porous narrating of the Self in relationship. Always in process, between “home” and studio spaces, in very smooth surfaces and in the things washed up in the sink of the sea. It is a great tumultuousness, poised on the brink of itself in porcelain. Glenday’s porcelain vessels – the formidable canon of them, the wings and the openings – are perhaps, more than anything, like this. An offering of a withness or a throughness for seeing the world, or for sounding it into existence.