Set Conversation Pieces, Detail, Convolvulus

This artwork featured in The Precious Clay (2019).

Highly charged both emotionally and politically, these works by Turner Prize nominee, Borland, are aptly made of bone china and decorated with the early blue and white Oriental patterns so prized in two centuries ago. These precious items were imported to England by ships that were also often implicated in the slave trade, the porcelain cargo exchanged for boatloads of slaves. Here, in place of the delicate cup and saucer, a little skull is placed within a pelvis, in a delivery position. Borland cast pelvises and foetal skulls from obstetric models. Her concerns are plain- birth, fragility, female stereotyping and commodification of goods and humans.

Image: Christine Borland, Set Conversation Pieces, Detail, Convolvulus, hand painted bone china, 1998. Image courtesy the artist. 

 

About the artist

Christine Borland

Christine Borland exhibited in The Precious Clay, Museum of Royal Worcester, 2019. 

 

Image: Christine Borland, Set Conversation Pieces, Detail, Convolvulus, 1998. Hand painted bone china. Courtesy the artist.