Bronwynne Cornish Hopefully Mudlark will introduce Cornish to a new audience who are not aware of her history and the profound influence her work has had on contemporary ceramics—she was one of the first New Zealand artists to combine multiple ceramic objects in large-scale installations, building narratives and creating powerful physical experiences for viewers. Perhaps her most radical work is Dedicated to the Kindness of Mothers, a site-specific installation shown at Auckland City Art Gallery in late 1983. Cornish was a practicing Buddhist at the time and the work originated from a Buddhist meditation of the same name. It was a potent mix of the ancient and the modern, the emotional and the coolly conceptual. “I started with the meditation, the idea that I wanted to create a large figure lying on the ground, and I wanted to acknowledge past mothers … The lighting of the work is very important to me because I’m trying to create an atmosphere—I’m not really all that interested in all the individual objects. I’m only interested in them as a whole so I see all the things I make as one continuous work.” Like any figurative sculptor Cornish must grapple with the issue of how to display her work in the white cube. She avoids the plinth at all costs and many of her installations are floor based. In Dedicated to the Kindness of Mothers the large, roughly formed female figure which dominates the work was made from Three Kings basalt roughly heaped on the floor. In contrast the figure’s fired ceramic head was smooth with a curiously animated smiling face. Beside the figure were three cast urns filled with fresh flowers and leaves that were regularly replenished by friends of the gallery. Gazing down from the walls was a row of 52 ceramic skull-shaped masks. As much a celebration as a memorial, the work sought to re-cast death in a more positive light than is common in western culture. It interwove gratitude and love for the sacrifices made by generations of women and an awareness of genealogy with Buddhist notions of the impermanence of life. Though the choice of materials and formal symmetry evoked Prehistoric civilisations, Dedicated to the Kindness of Mothers also felt highly contemporary—perhaps because of the pink neon lights on the floor which cast a hazy glow up over the skulls, adding to the sense this was a celebration rather than a wake. Appropriately, given the work originated from a meditation, Cornish says she wanted to slow the viewer down and encourage them to spend more time looking. The repetition of objects and their formal arrangement in the space meant the work had a strongly ritualistic atmosphere that was further emphasised by the dim lighting. “Light really influences how people feel,” says Cornish. “If you make the lighting quite low people have to pause while their eyes adjust. It’s extraordinarily hard to get people to look at your work for more than three or four minutes. We live in such a busy world where people are constantly engaged in things technological—their attention span is very short.” After 50 years working with clay and indulging her fiercely experimental spirit, pushing the boundaries of what the material can do, Cornish still loves it. “There are hundreds of ways you can work with clay—it’s a very willing and pliable material,” she says. “I think you can be overwhelmed by the craft of it and forget about the imagery—I always want my work to look quite fresh and animated.” Cornish is careful not to get too attached to her sculptures before they come out of the kiln. “When you work with clay you truly come to grips with impermanence. It’s not just a theory – it’s a reality all the time. Clay is something that can easily break at any stage: I can drop it; I can blow it up; there’s never any assurance that you’re going to end up with your object.”