Annie McIver
“ Everything I make tends to hark back to childhood and to the collective unconscious. I make what I feel like making and sort out why later. Its an attempt to integrate the internal me with the outside world.Samuel Beckett in his play Waiting for Godot best expresses it.”
Hand Built Ceramic
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Annie is from a fine art background, and uses ceramic as her form of expression. Her work is deep, challenging, confrontational as well as beautiful. Everything is a one-of-a-kind, and with all her work, the title is as important as the piece itself. You can't take your eyes off them, you find yourself responding in a way that is so deep...that is when you know she's got you! ARTFORM.
Feature
"Perhaps that's what I feel, an outside and an inside and me in the middle, perhaps thats what I am, the thing that divides the world in two, on one side the outside, on the other the inside, that can be as thin as foil, I'm neither one side nor the other, I'm in the middle, I'm the partition, I've two surfaces and no thickness, perhaps that's what I feel, myself vibrating, I'm the tympanum, on the one side the mind, on the other the world"...(Samuel Beckett). That's what the image Transparency was about. Integrating inside with outside gives a truth that people can see. Enough waxing lyrical."
As a figurative ceramic sculptor, I hand build using both coil and slab techniques and construct in a modular way. The formation of identity, particularly during childhood, continues to be my focus. The motivation in my making is to capture and encapsulate those small haemorrhages of the self, the dualities we encounter, which chart our emotional progress through life. I completed a Master of Design at Unitec in 2012.
Someone said to me that artists often carry a group of themes within them for a lifetime and certainly, for me, I see themes in what I make recurring in a variety of forms. As a child I often dreamt that I could float. The dream was so intense that when I awoke I momentarily would believe this was possible in real life. The sensation has remained with me all my life. Icarus, the falling figure has also been a preoccupation. Placing falling and floating figures in the same plane provokes a visual disjunct. The notion of levity and gravity in the air is incomprehensible. We float in water and fall from the sky unless we see it in a dream.