Deep Ornament: Eliza Au and the Pursuit of Serenity
For some artists, creative development follows a path of constant novelty, a perpetual search for new ways to interact with, and interpret the world. For others, creative growth moves along a more measured path, continually renewing and expanding core perceptions or insights. Eliza Au is an artist on this second path. Over the past ten years or so, her work has exhibited a progressive unfolding, with deepening and complex core ideas that center on a search for spiritual serenity in a chaotic and emotionally disturbing world. Her ceramic sculptures incorporate interlocking fields of repeating patterns; they resemble three-dimensional nets or weavings of dense but perforated forms. For Au, pattern and complexity function as stimuli; spiritual aids that lead the mind towards fulfilling resolutions.
Born and raised in Vancouver, Canada, Au received her MFA in 2009 from the New York State College of Ceramics at Alfred University. She attended artist residencies at the Pilchuck Glass School in Stanwood, WA; the European Ceramic Work Centre in s’-Hertogenbosch, NL; Guldagergaard International Research Center, in Skalskor, DK, and the Pottery Workshop in Jingdezhen, China. From 2017 to 2019, she was a full-time faculty member of the Alfred-CAFA Design for Industry Program at the Central Academy of Fine Arts, and an Alfred University Affiliate, in Beijing, China. She is currently Assistant Professor of Ceramics at the University of North Texas in Denton, Texas.
Most recently, Eliza Au was one of three recipients of the James Renwick Alliance Chrysalis Award of Excellence for 2020. Comprising educators, collectors, artists and art professionals, the James Renwick Alliance is dedicated to scholarship, education, and public appreciation of contemporary American craft. The award was established in 2016 to support emerging American craft artists who demonstrate excellence and commitment to artistic innovation, and, as recipients are chosen from a large and highly competitive pool of submissions, it carries significant national and international prestige.
Eliza Au’s complex forms have evolved by means of a slow, Au’s submission for the prize, is characteristic of her work at that time. She created the design with the assistance of a computer and incorporated repeating motifs derived from historical ornament. Au developed an innovative system of assembling slip-cast components inside a box, later drying and firing them on purpose-built supports. The completed work resembled an intricate, three-dimensional maze, with patterns that emerged and shifted as viewers moved around it. Au felt she had solved a difficult puzzle and achieved a solution that accomplished her goals.
