Philip Beesley
Catalogue essay for Neil Forrest Hiving Mesh - An
Architectural Screen
Saint Mary's University Art Gallery, Halifax
February 19 to March 18,2000
ISBN 1-895763-56-8
"A constructed porosity lying inside of a hard
crust- and a darker tone of cellular forms
that misfire." [1]
An array of fired porcelain clay forms and glass paste
plaques hangs vertically, its aligned surfaces forming an outer
face. Behind this crust is an interlinked matrix of hundreds of
small ceramic objects, densely compressed fragments resembling plant
bulbs and body organs. A delicate meshwork of stainless steel wire
struts connects each fragmented element to its neighbour, making
a cloud of forms like an enormous mass of molecules hovering in
open space. Immersing us.
Neil Forrests’ new architectural ceramic work was
produced after repeated walks in the woods near his home in Nova
Scotia. In Polly’s Cove, near Peggy’s Cove, he found pines deformed
by severe winds from the ocean. The thin, spindly branches of these
trees held masses of diseased cones growing in dense clusters curling
and clumping together, their skins scarring and blurring into innumerable
oblate lobes, dissolving into each other. Forrest took these forms
as the basis for a new work exploring a special porosity where fields
of space intermingle, melting the borders between discrete elements.
This expanded structure has a peculiar anatomy with poignant implications.
It is a work of crystalline geometry whose lattice structures expand
out in a radiant mathematical efflorescence, and at the same time
it is built out of natural organs making a complex flesh with a
living presence. This expanded formal space and these acute poetics
renew the traditional medium of architectural ceramics. They act
as a refreshed ornament expressing a new kind of architectural space.
