Ordinary, extraordinary Honor Freeman

Ordinary, extraordinary

Story by Kate Le Gallez. Photography by Grant Hancock.

Page left: ‘Fade (in pink) detail’, 2021, porcelain, gold cluster, 64 x 64 x 3cm. Above: ‘Everyday luxury’, 2021, porcelain, 6 x 32 x 15cm.

The centrepiece of ceramic artist Honor Freeman’s upcoming exhibition is currently marooned on a trailer in her Encounter Bay backyard. Leading me through her house and outside to her backyard studio, she laughs at the incongruous sight of the upturned bath on the trailer. ‘It’s so heavy we can’t get it off,’ she explains, speaking quickly and energetically. ‘It will probably end up in the garden full of plants.’

It will have to come off the trailer soon. Honor has sourced a replacement that needs picking up, a yellow enamel bath that can more easily be transported to the Adelaide Railway Station for Neoteric, an Adelaide Festival exhibition of twenty mid-career practitioners from South Australia. She tells me she’s drawn to the duality of rising tides and receding floods for this piece, picturing the bath moored on ceramic besser blocks. She’s currently experimenting with different materials and methods to re-create the sense of tide lines and receding flood level waters. ‘In this instance the water occupies an emotional and metaphorical space, loosely thinking about keeping our heads above water, being moored or marooned, or maybe just going with the ebbs and flows. ‘A lot of the ideas behind much of my work start off very loosely. Kind of gathering many things and putting it into the work from my perspective,’ she explains. Here, she imagines emotional tides, rather than environmental; the bath might be adorned with ceramic soap barnacles and evidence leaks sustained over its life. It also references the interplay between liquid and solid central to Honor’s craft of slip casting, which sees liquid porcelain poured into a mould and then refined into a physical memory of the original object. ‘Possibly the viewer will see it and not get any of that or they’ll walk away with something entirely different,’ Honor says. ‘I think there are many places that you can kind of enter the work and take from it.’

This work continues Honor’s artistic engagement with the unassuming artefacts of everyday life. From plastic food containers to light switches, handkerchiefs and kitchen sponges, Honor has gravitated towards these humble, democratic objects which unpretentiously open a pathway between the work and the viewer. ‘The nostalgia wrapped up in those things is really fascinating for lots of people. It really does kind of bring back your familial relationships and memories,’ she says.

There’s poetry too in the relationship between clay and utility. The workhorses of ceramic artists are functional items – mugs, plates, vases – which gather stories as they are used by people. ‘I do like that relationship between ceramics and the everyday as well. It feels like the right kind of voice for that material for me,’ she explains. >

Top: ‘Leak’, 2021, slipcast porcelain, 2.5 x 97 x 12.5cm. Above left: ‘Sunlight for a pandemic’, 2021, porcelain, gold lustre, 3 x 79 x 79cm. Above right: Honor Freeman in her studio, 2021. Photograph by Alex Beckett.

Honor was still studying at art school when she made her first slip cast of a bar of used soap, courtesy of her cleaning job at a budget hotel. ‘I loved finding these spaces people had occupied,’ she says. ‘I loved the traces that were left behind.’ Including, more often than not, leftover pieces of soap. ‘I remember bringing them in because I was just trying to cast anything at that point.’

It was many years before she again cast a soap. That time included years spent at Jam Factory, in Sydney and working with remote Territory communities alongside her partner, Luke Mount. Years that also encompassed early motherhood to Flynn, now nearly ten, and Greta, now six. When Greta was just six months, Honor returned to soap, finding solace in the repetitive work of slip casting the worn and discarded cakes at a time when she was feeling disconnected from her practice. The soaps offered a path back to her work, culminating in her 2016 exhibition Soap Score, which explored how a life might be measured through the accrued remnants of personal care.

Soap, alongside other items of domestic utility, continue to appear in Honor’s work, including her 2019 exhibition for the Art Gallery of South Australia, Ghost Objects. Created in the wake of her father’s death, the exhibition included a series of wall-mounted soaps mapped among the Gallery’s collection. Honor repaired the soap seams with gold, referencing the Japanese process of kintsugi, the process healing both the ceramic renderings and offering catharsis for a grieving daughter.

By 2020, she felt ready to let soaps go as part of her public practice. But then, of course, soap was suddenly getting unexpected airtime. As the events of 2020 oozed their way into 2021, soap was again a place of technical refuge as well as a surprisingly relevant lens through which to explore life in a pandemic. ‘Sunlight for a pandemic’ played with a palette of yellow tones, invoking joy, hope and the sun’s life-giving rays, while recognising yellow’s sinister underside. The colour has stood both as a symbol of cowardice and dishonour, while yellow flags signalled the presence of infection during the Spanish flu outbreak.

Having moved to the Fleurieu a year ago, Honor measures her days in ocean swims, rather than cakes of soaps. She and Luke hold a shared awe of the ocean and wanted to live in a place that enabled them to build the pursuit of this wonder into their family’s daily life. Together with a group of locals, Honor traverses Horseshoe Bay most mornings, swimming, chatting and finding exhilaration in the ever-changing ocean. It’s another way she sees the extraordinary in the ordinary.