FRIEZE LONDON

Ayla Tavares

New Ceramics Section ‘Smoke’ - Booth S1

October 9 - 13, 2024
The Regent's Park, London, UK

Joined booth with Galerie Athena

Press released (pdf)

Press:

New York Times

Financial Times

Beaux Art Magazine (print)

HATCH Gallery and Galeria Athena are pleased to present at FRIEZE London, a solo presentation by the artist Ayla Tavares (b. 1990 in Rio de Janeiro, BR). By establishing relationships with different moments in the past to think about memory and everyday life, Tavares elaborates on new ways of conceiving past time in the present - through archaeological and sacred artefacts. To understand materiality in its entanglements, the artist gives life to notations and constellations of objects in another way, generating new propositional bodies in relationships of strangeness and speculation. Operating manually, Tavares’ process involves equal amounts of craft, intuition and physicality, as she considers ceramics a living medium as it engages in a continuous exchange with its surrounding environment creating a synergy between body and artwork that blurs the boundaries between them.

The presentation One Step Forward and I am No Longer in the Same Place unfolds as a site-specific installation, like a stage to unify different temporalities, and includes a series of ceramic sculptures in a variety of shapes and sizes, textures and colours. These pieces go beyond their materiality and form to evoke the artist’s infatuation to investigate the concrete and magical nature of time enhancing the idea of radical imperceptibility. She explores encounters at the thresholds of human understanding, sensing, knowing, or the possibilities of relationship with the nonhuman and the vulnerability and exhilaration that these cause.

Tavares’s masterpiece, Uma forma sempre úmida [An Always Humid Form] composed of various ceramic pieces unify as a chimerical totem or organism immersed in an aquarium, with networks of water constantly permeating its structure. At its centre is a small clay sponge, moulded into a shape reminiscent of a "bull's head" - a fundamental gesture in clay practice that marks the genesis of any sculpted narrative. This initial act of shaping clay, preserved in a perpetually humid environment, symbolises the bearing of narrative and the potential of creation, maintained in a state of perpetual possibility.

Orbiting around Uma forma sempre úmida is a collection of works from her series Matéria Matéria [Matter Matter], shaped approximately as the size of the open palms of her hands. They act as a catalogue of geological and cosmic phenomena that are elusive due to their temporal or physical scale. Illustrations within Matéria Matéria investigate the concrete and magical nature of time enhancing the idea of radical imperceptibility. For example, they may depict the discovery of a distant star, tectonic shifts and the intricate patterns of coral and ocean ridge.

If ceramics are considered by archaeologists to be eternal, bearing witness to different societies, water allows us to think about the genealogy of each form and object. By bringing them to light in this presentation, Ayla Tavares attempts to preserve the primitive act of creation and account for the dynamic between change and continuity, space and time.

Courtesy of the galleries