Gerry Wedd, SONGS FOR A ROOM (detail) (2018), glazed ceramic, dimensions variable. Installation view, ACE Open. Courtesy the artist. Photo: Sam Roberts Photography.
Enter the iconic world of South Australia’s most celebrated potter, fringe dweller, savant gardener and pretty-good-surfer, Gerry Wedd.
SONGS FOR A ROOM draws on 40 years of artistic practice and an encyclopaedia of personal interests to present Wedd’s most ambitious project yet. Inspired by Victor Hugo’s tiled dining room, more than 1000 handmade tiles and domestic objects form a frenzied and immersive installation that subverts traditional museum displays of domestic handicrafts. Wedd creates a dizzyingly opulent world, where song writing, Delft tile painting, popular culture and art history collide with current socio-political issues.
As part of Wedd’s commentary on the commodification of art and culture in a time when people continue to live below the poverty line, each tile in this speculative shelter is available to purchase, with 50% of proceeds donated to Adelaide Day Centre for Homeless Persons.
SONGS FOR A ROOM is one of two ACE Open South Australian Artist Commissions for 2018, alongside Julia McInerney’s The Garden.
Tiles and objects from SONGS FOR A ROOM will be on sale from 11am, Saturday 28 July on site at ACE Open. Sales will be processed in person via EFTPOS in a first in best dressed manner. Unfortunately ACE Open cannot accept phone sales, cash sales or holds.
GERRY WEDD (born 1957) is one of Australia’s most celebrated ceramicists. Having studying jewellery, painting, and drawing, Wedd obtained a Masters in Fine Art from the University of South Australia in 2005. Early on in his career, Wedd became a graphic artist for quintessential Australian design company Mambo, where he continued to design for them until 2006. Wedd has exhibited extensively in Australia and internationally, including Havana Bienal, JamFactory, Ian Potter Museum of Art and Victoria and Albert Museum. He has received numerous awards including the Hobart Art Prize in 2010 and the 1998 Sidney Myer Fund International Ceramics Award and is represented in public collections around the country including the Art Gallery of South Australia, Powerhouse Museum – Museum of Applied Arts and Sciences, National Gallery of Australia, National Gallery of Victoria, Shepparton Art Museum and Queensland University of Technology.