Mollie Bosworth The Nature of Blue

Mollie Bosworth is a nationally recognised ceramicist who, for the past two decades, has been producing work from her home studio in the rainforest setting of Kuranda.

In recent years Bosworth has earned international attention for her fine porcelain forms. The Nature of Blue is a major solo exhibition and demonstrates her unique ability to manipulate the absorption and reflection of light, playing with layering and creating translucency in the clay body. The exhibition explores three key areas of her practice - materiality, surface and light.

For this exhibition, Bosworth has created new wheel-thrown vessels to further explore the spectrum of the colour blue. She has transformed imagery from her tropical garden into delicate botanical designs, which are then layered on the surface of the clay, applied as laser decals or as water-etched patterns.

Given her fascination with light, it is natural that Bosworth has also been drawn to experiment with cyanotype printing, a process whereby she exposes freshly-harvested rainforest leaves on fabric and paper substrates to develop an original design through the reaction of photosensitive chemicals in sunlight.

In addition to surface-applied botanical designs, Bosworth’s new body of work includes an exploration of water-soluble metallic salts and forms created through the fusion of coloured-clay bodies. Her limited series of Blue Spotted Rocking Bowls (2018) and Blue Agate Vessels (2018) demonstrate her proficiency with these innovative ceramic techniques.

The Nature of Blue celebrates Mollie Bosworth’s sensitive approach to ceramics and surface design and reveals her expertise in working with light on paper, silk and porcelain.

Image: Mollie BOSWORTH, wheel thrown vessels from the The Nature of Blue 2018 series. Photograph: Michael Marzik