Exhibition text by Audrey Pfister


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Ursla K. Le Guin famously wrote about the carrier bag – a net, a sling, a sack, a bottle, a container, a vessel – as the greatest early human invention, that is, it allows us to collect, to bear, and to hold. Against the common narrative of the hero and ‘his’ tool – the spear, the stick, the bone, the weapon –  Le Guin positions the carrier bag as the vital human instrument which has allowed us to bring energy home (a basket of wild oats), or to collect stories, and then to share, to store, to study, or to worship. “I now propose the bottle as hero”, she states. Just as Natalie O’Loughlin’s Holding Voids also proposes the bottle/vessel, as the central hero of the story.


The carrier bag is always relational. For Le Guin, the carrier bag is the perfect theory to understand storytelling. The carrier bag encloses and holds (tales, culture, memories) and it opens outwards (sharing, narrating, performing). In this way, we could read Natalie’s Holding Voids vessels as one kind of display of Le Guin’s idea. So then what stories do Natalie’s ceramic vessels tell us?


Handbuilt from coil techniques, Natalie’s ceramics are shaped in varying conical, totemic forms, some of the pieces bloat outwards, bending to one side, and others stretch tall and  upwards. Natalie has purposefully exaggerated the lopsidedness of her ceramic objects, aiming to accentuate the warping that will often occur at high temperatures. She tells me that she wants to express and explore how much of the process of ceramics is completely out of the maker's control. She says that almost half of the maker’s items don’t survive through the different stages of clay building, to drying, to firing, and glaze firing.


Over the years, Natalie has been grappling with this arduous ceramic process and how at times it feels like a futile exercise bound to produce disappointment. After searching for a reason to continue in the face of such setbacks, Natalie decided to embrace the process and potentials of failure and improvisation. In our contemporary capitalist moment the pressures of productivity and commodification of our time and labour make such a goal a difficult choice. If we can push against this pleasure we can find a place where we can recognise and feel the joy of just making — ceramics and stories. As Jack Halberstam described the Queer Art of Failure – “it quietly loses, and in losing it imagines other goals for life, for love, for art, and for being.”


What we, the audience, sees in Natalie’s work is not the failure that she describes she encounters in the making process, but instead we see beautiful, intriguging ceramic objects textured and fingerprinted with subtle memories of such labour. Despite embracing failure and pushing against productivity the ceramic vessels (and also the carrier bag) is undeniably utilitarian as well as relational. We can imagine these ceramic vessels functioning as containers of water to collect, or for flowers to display and share with others, or as vessels to propogate plants and grow new life. They may sit as a table centrepiece, and be part of collecting, gathering, and passing on new stories. And for a little while now, they sit in the gallery space which could also be considered “another, larger kind kind of pouch or bag, a container of people.”