Fruit & Bloom

Loretta Braganza’s latest work ‘Fruit & Bloom’ inhabits a space informed by her thirty years as a ceramic artist. 

Her journey is evident in the complex surface techniques honed and refined from an unconventional and self- taught methodology that began with her training as a graphic artist.

The pulsating rhythms and astonishing movement of these textural pieces started as a fascination with inter-related forms which are evident in her earliest works. Even the joy of these re-imagined fruit are thematic preoccupations – one of the 2005 works in her  ‘Fusion’ series was inspired by the angle of a seed slicing fruit skin. Yet in this new work her technique, form and subject show the maturity and joyous liberation of an artist at her peak.

Her innovative techniques involve painstaking applications of several coats of coloured slip that are applied and removed to reveal just the right luminous blush. The variety of everyday objects co-opted to make her textural markings are astonishing – from pencil ends, violin strings, to broken tubes and brush heads. Braganza makes notoriously difficult techniques look easy – like the flat ‘top’ insertions of two of the fruits. Such perfect linear flatness can only be achieved by weeks of drying, honing and a deep understanding of the unforgiving nature of a kiln firing.

‘Fruit & Bloom’ initially seems less about groupings than her previous works – yet they do relate to one another through their wonderful colouration – pulsing yellows, her trademark blue hues and the palest of peaches. Even the marks seem to leap form to form – here a letter glimpsed, there a number revealed, a continuing fascination with nature’s mathematical patterns. 

In this body of work there are six ‘real’ fruits – dragon, star, pineapple, jack, cashew, persimmon and four ‘imagined’. Together they provide the perfect canvas to display Braganza’s vibrant artistic energy and soaring inventiveness. The confidence with which she uses multimedia is a particularly striking element of the work –pin heads, the stem of a snake bark acer and even a bicycle spanner. But the boldness of her choices is always tempered with skilful artistic judgment that truly showcases her thirty years as a maker.