Transported

Roger Law, Stephen Bird

Transported features work from Roger Law and Stephen Bird; spanning three continents and bringing together two very different visions of the world. Work has been shipped from both China and Australia to be showcased in Edinburgh together for the first time.

Roger Law approached The Gallery in early 2014 with an idea for an exhibition which centred around cultural transportation, stemming from his own experience of living and working in Australia and his various journeys to China, where he frequently works and from where his ceramics return to Europe to be exhibited and sold. The exhibition quickly evolved as a two-hander with his friend Stephen Bird. The two had met in Sydney and Law wrote the introduction to Bird’s 2013 Edinburgh International Festival show with The Gallery My Dad was Born on the Moon.

Bird was born in The Potteries, trained at Duncan of Jordanstone in Dundee and making his home and a huge international reputation from Sydney he remains aloof from any artist pigeon-hole. Law’s subject is far from the historical-political world from which Bird extracts his concepts; he looks rather to nature (his subjects are delightful caricatures of the evolutionary process) while his design emphasis is on the decorative. In common, both artists are essentially subversive with little interest in convention; both are master craftsmen and both have completed residencies in China this year, acutely aware of the complex, vital history of their chosen medium between China and the West.