Adam Rish has been making ceramics in collaboration with Lino Alvarez in Hill End, 4 hours West of Sydney, since 2004. Lino Alvarez is a master potter from the Sonora (Mimbres) region of Mexico. He has had many exhibitions of his own work (including being represented in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York). He established La Paloma Pottery in 1981 and moved it to Hill End in 2002. He has been collaborating with other artists at La Paloma, since 2003.
"Metamorphoses"
In 2004 Adam Rish's show "Metamorphoses" was held at Michael Nagy Gallery Paddington. The exhibition (named after Ovid) was concerned with the transformation of humans ("click go the gene shears" ) into otherness - part animal, part machine. This transformation, with the rise of genetic technologies, was more than a metaphorical issue.
In TV Man an armless figure with a television face hops around on a long curling tail. After Giotto shows a large caterpillar chasing a car around an endless road. In Happy Family a naked couple run with an animal that has eaten their possessions. KFC Man has turned into a chicken surrounded by bone televisions.
Cartouche is a large terracotta work embossed with hundreds of images of cars, TVs, fish, plants and dollar signs. Drunken Bottle is an off-centre bottle encrusted with ears, eyes, plants and domestic objects.
Metamorphoses is a tapa wallpapered with walking fish, walking roads, walking cars, walking planes, walking phones, while N'ukulele has a headless figure in a tropical shirt and atomic suit, strumming up flying B52's (in place of ducks) from a tapa ukulele. Ornithogonia has transformed birds carrying exotic plants, missiles and even George Bush (a Bush in the bird).
Rish’s work is dystopic – he represents a world in confusion – but moderated by a comic humanism. The pieces are like souvenirs of front-page violence tamed into soft, hybrid, folk art forms.
Mimbres Ceramics
Classic Mimbres ceramics were produced in what is now New Mexico and Upper Mexico between 1000 and 1150 AD. The pieces were decorated with striking, black and white , anamorphic figures and geometric design. They were used for ceremonial burials with the bowls (like helmets) being placed on the skull of the deceased and the base broken to allow the spirit to escape.
Adam Rish's imagery has many affinities with Mimbres design. He has thus readily adapted these to the new ceramics. Drawing on his experience as a sculptor, he has combined repeated embossed and stamped elements onto the clay pots using rubber stamps and clay cast in plaster moulds. The pieces are then finished with a mix of glazed and unglazed surfaces, wax and gold.
Greek
In 2009 Rish produced five further works at Hill End which were shown at Mary Place by Australian Galleries as part of the Australian Ceramics Triennale 09. For this show he moved to influences from the height of Athenian pottery in the 6th century BC: In Greek men armed with rakes and garbage tin shields fight for glory. Agamemnon has a sgrafitto of angels and tanks battling for their project homes. In Olympia Nike clad runners find "things going better with Coke", while Bacchus men carry cars and pick bottles full of wine straight from the vine. Rock and Roll celebrates the dance of life with that classic blues band "Oedpus Rex" going full throttle.