The 1996 Anne & Gordon Samstag
International Visual Arts Scholarships
Artist: ANGELA VALAMANESH
Birds Have Fled ( detail) 1995
installation of plaster, beeswax, wooden door
and light box with text
dimensions variable
© the artist
Birds Have Fled ( detail) 1995
installation of plaster, beeswax, wooden door
and light box with text
dimensions variable
© the artist
The journey which artists take, over time, is sometimes unexpectedly distinguished by abrupt change in the methods and mores of their art making. The propensity of artists to courageously enter new conceptual terrain is of course the very stuff of innovation, without which evolution does not occur.
A ceramic artist of reputation and considerable sensibility, Angela Valamanesh has responded to this impulse for change, firstly by enlarging her vocabulary of materials into sculptural objects of mixed media and, more recently, by extending these ambitiously as installation. In Birds Have Fled, the narrative is constructed not as explicit meanings, but as 'felt' apprehensions of metaphysical space, transition and loss. In this, a universe of pleasurable darkness permeated with the translucent blue of a back-lit quotation from Colette, is punctured by stellar islands of white light. A door is slightly ajar - a corner is piled with remnant anthropomorphous shells - a body is swallowed by the wall.
Ross Wolfe
Director, Samstag Program
from the 1996 Samstag catalogue
Samstag's Class of '96
| ANGELA VALAMANESH Born 1953, Port Pirie, South Australia |
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| 1996 | Anne & Gordon Samstag International Visual Arts Scholarship: Postgraduate Program, Glasgow School of Art, Scotland, United Kingdom |
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| 1993 | Master of Arts (Visual Arts), South Australian School of Art, University of South Australia, Adelaide, Australia | |
| 1977 | Diploma in Design (Ceramics), South Australian School of Art, Adelaide |