Fiona Byrne-Sutton

Fiona Byrne-Sutton has created free-standing ceramic assemblages that distil and recombine her experiences of architecture, painting and

decorative art. The forms and layout of her recent work - The Angel’s Share - is informed by early Italian Renaissance painting; namely Duccio di Buoninsegna’s (d.1319) Maesta in Siena Cathedral and Giotto di Bondone’s (d.1337) Scrovegni Chapel frescoes in Padua, Italy.

 

Fiona’s most recent work is named The Angel’s Share, a term for whisky lost in evaporation in the cask barrel. In Fiona’s ceramic assemblages, however, it is a metaphor for the poetics of the temporal soul as described by Gaston Bachelard who says the soul is domestic, it likes a house and it daydreams in this cosy place.

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These daydreams share certain properties for the soul, reflects on itself

through form and image. The rectangle is terrestrial and the circle

aerial. Here, these forms are embedded in motifs such as a shallow

box, a recessed lair, a curved window, the round interior of a teacup.

Repeating forms and the spaces in between are fixations in time as is the solitary compressing of clay.

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These singular forms are also huts, a core image of inhabiting, of

dreaming solitude. The viewer's imagining locates the angel’s share

within themselves. The composition of Fiona’s ceramic assemblages are informed by early Italian Renaissance painting - namely Duccio di Buoninsegna’s