ANNA GLEESON (b. Newcastle, Australia, 1978) studied at Sydney College of the Arts and has lived between Berlin, Hong Kong, and New York for the last two decades. She works across printmaking, painting, and sculpture and has exhibited widely in Asia.
Her interest in ceramics stems from her early experiences of drawing vessels she encountered in museums. In her words, “I like the way they communicate across culture and time. Looking at an ancient Mesopotamian pot in the Louvre, I think: ‘I know what you mean.’ I know how to handle it and what I might use it for; it has an obvious relationship to the body. The paintings and prints of vessels here are my reading of that language.” For Gleeson, the intrigue of vessels lies in their dual nature, with an inside and an outside, a hole, an edge, and a rim. She admires the way they can stand in for the figure, seeming to have ankles, hips, arms, lips, ears, and an attitude.
Craftsmanship, a skill she admires, is out of her reach: “Craftsmanship is about an intimacy with materials and staying just inside the limits of the materials.” She delights in pushing the materials beyond what they can bear, creating new methodologies that interrupt and complicate existing modes of making. Gleeson's practice is bound up in her curiosity to see how the clay and form will fail, and what that failure might look like. This process reconnects the artist to her memories of making in childhood: not being as “good” as she’d like to be, but being completely absorbed in the attempt anyway.