Solo Show: Galerie de Witte Voet Amsterdam

This solo exhibition brought together a body of work that addressed the relationship between materiality and haptic/tactile concerns inherent in the use of clay with the particular themes underlying Bugg’s fine art practice of timelessness, the horizon and landscape in relation to a sculptural reality, material substance, human scale and physical presence through sequences of fired clay reliefs and ceramic installations.

Developed in direct relation to his drawing practice, the sculptures used processes of hand building and fundamental mechanical construction that mirror the gesture and mark-making of graphite and paper, developed as a parallel practice throughout this project. Realised through the use of minimal ceramic techniques the work exploits haptic and tactile qualities generated through an ever-more limited range of materials, unpigmented glazes and building techniques.

Bugg has a long-term working relationship with Galerie de Witte Voet, Amsterdam, which has an international reputation in the specialist field of fine art ceramics. The gallery has achieved this through a programme of solo exhibitions of artists working in clay from the UK, USA, Japan, Belgium, Netherlands, France and Spain, including Martin Smith, Claire Twomey (UK), Xavier Toubes (Spain), Jassu Kaneko and Saturo Hoshino (Japan).

The installation of the work within the context of the specific space of the gallery, a traditional Dutch house in the central district of Amsterdam with its particular qualities of tactile surface and light, facilitated a rigorous interrogation of the physical presence, materiality and haptic qualities of the work through its location in direct relationship to the planes created by the walls and floors of this particular interior.

The exhibition was reviewed by Siobhan Wall in ‘Ceramics, Art and Perception’, Issue 56

Bugg's creativity expresses itself in an indirect dialogue between his paper-based drawings and his three-dimensional pieces for wall and floor. Beneath their apparent quietude, his installations present an underlying challenge to the conventions of the gallery space itself, activating areas which are normally mute and unregarded, suggesting connections and relationships which shift the viewer's understanding of the voids and solids which populate the room.

The elements which make up Bugg's work speak with dislocated voices. The circular wall components are baked in a ceramicist's oven rather than constructed from materials more usually found in a sculptor's studio; their slim forms are no thicker than a canvas on a stretcher, yet the eye reads them as three dimensional; each is a unique entity positioned in its own field, yet Bugg deploys them to deliver unity. He mixes languages - the hollows of the small-scale thinly-walled vessels which he places in sudden groups echo with references quite different from those of the glazed discus shapes which float somewhere between flight and fixity across his walls and floors. He plays games with weight, with texture, with abstraction and geometry, and - by inference - with invisibility as well as the visible, suggesting coherence within a framework that denies overt order. Just as each component carries its own delicately achieved surface variation, so the whole is finely controlled to embrace disruption and stillness, rhythm and break, primitivism and sophistication, energy and latency.