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Sydney, NSW
Anne Kwasner is an artist who converses with her audience through drawing, upcycled ceramics, clay and installation.
Message
Anne Kwasner is an artist who converses with her audience through drawing, upcycled ceramics, clay and installation.
The 3D of her installation and ceramic pieces merge with her 2D drawing. Kwasner has been exhibiting consistently since 2006, with a strong history of working with independent spaces.
She is currently focused on two bodies of work. The first speaks of the migrant experience, ideas of dislocation, diaspora, and the melancholy of displacement. Anne has worked on this idea as an individual practitioner and collaborator with Dr George Catsi. I Come with Baggage (Chrissie Cotter Gallery, Sydney (2017), is an immersive site-specific installation about the experience of migration.
The second body of work focuses on gun culture, gun rights, religion, nationalism, and fetishism, a complex web, particularly in America. Again, working in drawing, ceramics and clay.
Kwasner completed a Master's in Ceramics at the National Art School (NAS) in 2019 For over a decade. She has practised as a curator and facilitator in the art disability space.
Kwasner has been a finalist in the Nth Queensland Art Prize, North Sydney Art Prize, Redlands Art Prize, Shoalhaven Contemporary Art Prize, Maitland Art Prize, Rookwood Cemetery ‘Hidden’ Sculpture and the Hutchins Drawing Prize. She has been a recipient of an Art Start Grant, Australia Council and the Vytlacil Residency in New York and her work is held in private collections both in Australia and abroad.
Statement
Drawing is a process of thought for me and a product. I am always looking for different drawing languages and surfaces. My skill evolves as I explore the use of ceramic material and ceramic paint; onglaze.
Thematically I have two lines of enquiry; I have been exploring exile and the experience of estrangement and separation. My parents, who migrated from Poland, lived through war and then isolation from the rest of the modern world during the communist era. Arrived in Sydney with few objects: photos, a suitcase and a ceramic tea set given as a wedding present.
I have drawn on plates retrieved from opportunity shops as incomplete sets. Metaphorically paralleling émigrés who have lost members of families to war. Incomplete dinnerware is like incomplete families. Through drawing members of my family from old photos, I trace the lines of history with lines of onglaze.
My second line of enquiry has been the relationship of guns to American culture. In contemporary America, the relationship people have to their guns has become a close
alliance between humans and a Christian God, who happens to be white and male. Gun culture sits at the intersection between religion and nationalism. I'm drawn to how the second amendment gives people the right to bear arms, yet people feel a distinct lack of trust when they arm themselves. This becomes a cultural norm for their children. There is a proliferation of photographs of children on the internet holding and playing with guns. The guns are considered educational toys. As young people get older, the photos of gun holders become less ‘wholesome’ and more fetishistic. This is an incongruous combination of imagery that metaphorically describes the inconsistency of American religion and gun culture. In this series, I also have slip-cast toy guns and decorated them.