Kerry Harker

A collection of traditional willow-pattern plates were deliberately smashed and re-made for a piece called 'Rules of the Game', presented in this group show as part of the Leeds-based Vitrine project. Shown in a glazed cabinet within Leeds Art Gallery in a manner akin to traditional museum-type displays, the piece is part of an ongoing concern within my work around the reading of ceramics and their ability to carry conceptual messages. The romanticised quasi-English, quasi-Chinese provenance of the willow pattern, with its narrative of doomed lovers, make it a symbol whose meaning and origins are continually slipping and ripe for reinvention. There is a perverse enjoyment in repeating the act of breaking and remaking the same thing over and over, (which is the same yet different every time) and a pleasurable recognition in the circularity of the pattern.