What leaf-fring’d legend haunts about thy shape
Of deities or mortals, or of both,
In Tempe or the dales of Arcady?
What men or Gods are these?
What maidens loth
What mad pursuit?
What struggle to escape?
What pipes and timbrels?
What wild ecstasy?

Thou, silent form, dost tease us out of thought
As doth eternity

John Keats Ode on a Grecian Urn

As Keats speculates about the narrative portrayed on the surface of the Grecian Urn, he also wrestles with ideas of immortality, eternal youth, physical desire, and the big ones, beauty and truth. The urn of his contemplation is more than a vessel; it is classical Greece, marooned in the Romantic soul of nineteenth century England.

When we look at a Michael Keighery vase we are teased in quite different ways. It is not the endurance of beauty, truth and art we are asked to contemplate, but rather the evolution of these constructs themselves. In Michael Keighery’s work what appears on first encounter to be an intricately patterned vase is no more than the surface of a vase, totally without function, propped up by an everyday bottle. In the Picnic Cup, a bronzed baked bean can with golden wings sits on a worn stone base. And in Heavenly Cups, disposable coffee cups, embossed and dressed in pastel-coloured pearline glazes, sprout wings and float about in an ephemeral teacup ballet.

Michael confesses to being confounded by the ways in which people are ‘seduced by the look’ of ceramic objects, and how the manner of looking contributes to or distorts the integrity of the work (Casting a Wide Net catalogue, Lake Macquarie City Gallery, 1991). For instance, most of the visual information we accrue about ceramic objects is via the medium of the photograph. So what we see, and are quite often enchanted by, is not the whole work, but merely one aspect of it. The rest we construct for ourselves, just as Keats reconstructed Arcadia through the surface frieze of a vase.

In his recent exhibition, Decada, at Mura Clay Gallery in Sydney, Michael continues to challenge our perceptions and give our cherished distinctions between the banal and the precious, the everyday and the fantastic, a hearty shaking. It is not so much the objects themselves, but the ‘cultural context that enabled the work to be made’ together with a playful engagement with western history and the history of ceramics, which inform and guide the creation and reception of these pieces. For example, the profile face of Mao Tse Tung is an image that has appeared in every context from the Chinese red and gold badge of allegiance to Western radical chic. At the same time the profile medallion form is reminiscent of the commemorative and allegorical porcelain medallions produced by Thomas Woolner and Lucien Henry in colonial Australia. When Mao caught the current in the Yangze River, the Communist Party officials lauded the event as evidence of the great strength and endurance both of the Great Helmsman and the Chinese people. Mao and the Lifesaver emerges in this context as a humorous reworking of the medallion form and a visual pun which mercilessly satirizes political spin-doctoring.

Although he would most probably dispute it, Michael Keighery has always dealt with ideas in his work, not in a didactic or illustrative sense, but through his ability to surprise, delight and occasionally affront his audience. He is able to take something as banal as the Willow Pattern for instance, and create from it a stunningly beautiful grid of plates, engraved using a computer program to drive a CNC milling machine. At the same time, he might satirize his own technological prowess with a series of Vases Based on Good Design. Similarly, traditional distinctions between art and craft are provoked by a series of Really Useful Vases, which of course clearly aren’t at all useful.

Art investment guru Terry Ingram commented recently on the ‘cross-media, cross-gallery’ activities of Australian artists which are resulting in the availability of high quality investment ceramics and an increasing demand for ceramic art. Painters who pot or who paint pots, are nothing new, in fact as Ingram points out, they are part of a long tradition in Australian art practice (Terry Ingram ‘Smart art’ Australian Financial Review 15/12/2001, p35). There are perhaps fewer artists, however, who move from three dimensions to two, but Michael Keighery has found this transition a fruitful one with the production of several series of prints which arose from his experimentation with CNC milling technologies. What began as an interest in surface decoration in ceramics became a fascination with surface pattern as form, out of which grew the enchanting Archaeology of Memory exhibition of ceramics and prints. The ideas, which inform the work, retain their power throughout the shift in media, and each new expression of the idea retains its integrity.

Michael Keighery’s work reflects his manner of working, a manner that embraces technologies for what they can afford his ongoing critical interests. He is less interested in what he sees as virtuosity for its own sake preferring the ‘fuzzy bits’, the meanings not quite revealed, the contradictions encoded in both language and form. He would be less than pleased if we were to agonize like Keats, over meaning in the work at the expense of a more immediate response to its making, but at the same time I think he would be miffed if we failed to get the joke.