Samantha Dickie

Ceramic installations seek the spacious.

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Stepping over wet grey paint on the exterior threshold of the Victoria Arts Council gallery, I’m met inside with a dazzling blue – fresh aqua walls and floors wash up and over as if I’m diving into some tropical grotto. I’m the first person to see the show, other than staff and the installation crew, director Kegan McFadden tells me as I blink in the intense colour. Victoria artist Samantha Dickie’s exhibition, A Moment in Time, composed of four abstract ceramic installations, aims to evoke a sense of spaciousness – whether in an aerial, an aqueous or a spiritual sense. The blue surround, Dickie mentions later, was McFadden’s idea.

Two installations composed of small porcelain disks that dangle from fishing line immediately catch the eye. One, titled Still Point, is hemispheric. The other, Drop, is composed of two circular plates, one stacked above the other. Individual disks hover, swaying slightly in transient air currents, creating dappled shadows on the floor that resemble the choppy sparkle of refracted light on the bottom of a sunlit swimming pool.

The disks, which Dickie produced using moulds in a variety of oval and oblong shapes, are about the size and wan colouring of sand dollars. Some are flat, while others are slightly cupped. Each is punctured with small holes to facilitate the vertical strings of fishing line, which catch the light in engaging ways. They are unglazed apart from a smear of molten glass with a blueish tinge. Some of it remains granular, like a dusting of sand. The fishing line creates subtle gridded shadows atop the discs.

A third installation, Written on the Body, forms a linear chain along a rear wall. Set at chest height, it's composed of irregularly shaped ceramic forms, each bisected by dark ribbon-like photo transfers of  textured surfaces. My mind moves again to the aqueous – tidelines, ribbons of kelp and clams or some stranger bivalve, shells cracked slightly ajar. 

The gallery was once a bank, and the fourth installation, Grounded, is inside the old-fashioned vault. Here ceramic orbs are piled up to knee height on the floor. Sloping upwards away from the vault’s door, the assemblage resembles a rocky beach, except the rocks – which have deeply pleasurable surface variations, whether smooth, shiny, granular or pock-marked – are arranged in loosely striated bands that run vertically up the slope, at odds with what might occur naturally on a beach. 

There’s a lovely poetic circularity in using clay to make objects that resemble rocks – earth to earth, as the burial service intones. Placing them in a bank vault opens more metaphorical possibilities. But, materially, the vault is small and contained, invoking constriction not expansiveness. I find my response is more cerebral than visceral. 

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Samantha Dickie, “A Moment in Time,” 2021

Samantha Dickie, “A Moment in Time,” 2021

installation view at Victoria Arts Council (photo by Portia Priegert)

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Samantha Dickie, “Still Point,” 2019

Samantha Dickie, “Still Point,” 2019

porcelain, 1,100 components, detail of installation (photo by Portia Priegert)

The two hanging installations are airier, their pleasures sensed in the body. But even with them, I don’t reach a metaphysical plane – my itchy pandemic mask, the noise of the street, and the guy painting the steps outside all distract from reverie. I find myself questioning the precise tint of the blue surround ­­– the colour pushes me deeply to the aqueous, rather than McFadden’s didactic evocation of “neither sea nor sky but more of a momentary void.” Perhaps its effect varies by time of day in a windowed space. The gallery's low ceilings and compact size also detract from the work's full potential. Nothing to be done there, of course, but I’d love to see it installed someday in a more spacious setting.

Interestingly, when I referred later to my iPhone snapshots, their haphazard framing gave me a stronger sense of the abstract and metaphysical. I began to wonder if I have seen so much art mediated by technology over the last 18 months – and so little in person – that my vision has become calibrated to the digital. Let’s hope any such tendency is a reversible symptom of the pandemic. ■  

Samantha Dickie: A Moment in Time at the Victoria Arts Council from Sept. 10 to Oct. 31, 2021.

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Pat Martin Bates Gallery at Victoria Arts Council

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