PROFILE
KIRSTEN COELHO TRANSFIGURED NIGHT
A deep black. Then turning into the gallery proper, before one’s eyes have adapted, a long stretch of illuminated paleness appears, seemingly floating in mid air. It leaves an imprint an afterglow - on the eyes and brain. Words by Patsy Hely Patsy is an artist and educator.
Above: Installation view 2018 Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art: Divided Worlds featuring works by Kirsten Coelho, JamFactory, Adelaide. Photographer: Saul Steed.
Weeks after my visit, this powerful image remains. Kirsten Coelho’s Transfigured Night, 2017 is an installation of over 70 porcelain vessels displayed on a 14 metre-long grey platform. The forms are domestic in nature, utilitarian, but installed so the objects are closer to eye level than table height, suggesting that looking rather than handling is of prime importance. The colours are pale, some glazed, some not, and they range in size from small bowls to large basins. The work overall is ambitious in scale and execution. Transfigured Night was part of the 2018 Adelaide Biennial Divided Worlds with the divide here being between night and day, between the known and the unknown. Coelho has cited Russell Drysdale’s 1945 The Drover’s Wife and Henry Lawson’s story of the same name as catalysts for her thinking. These references enrich the artwork lending it a particularly local character. Individual objects are lit from above, washed with cool silvery light that picks out their varying shapes while also creating shadows and distortions that convey a similar sense of foreboding to that found especially in Lawson’s story. In previous work, Coelho has grouped different vessel types together, but here she mobilises a virtual compendium of ceramic objects: bottles, flasks, bowls small and large, cups, beakers, goblets, basins, flat dishes and more. The ceramics historian Phillip Rawson suggests that all ceramic forms spawn a host of related types 1 and Transfigured Night engages with this idea where the lighting and the positioning of the works causes shadows in some places to project onto a form an altered version of its own shape. In this
