Stockroom Kyneton, gallery two
29 November 2025 / 11 January 2026
DAVID RAY
Asian Style with a Western Rhyme
In March 2025, I journeyed to Jingdezhen, China. Often called the “Porcelain Capital of the world” Jingdezhen is renowned for its ancient porcelain production that stretches back more than 1,700 years. I arrived carrying questions, yet the place welcomed me with an uncanny sense of familiarity. It didn’t feel like a destination; it felt like returning home to something I had always known but never named. Within the ancient city, the clay carries the memory of countless hands.
One evening, thanks to our group leader Janet DeBoos, I shared my work with a porcelain factory owner. He regarded it with long, thoughtful stillness before saying:
*“Your work has an Asian style with a Western rhyme.”
Those words felt like a quiet revelation—naming the in-between place where my practice truly lives: between cultures, between inheritances, in the soft spiritual space where traditions meet without needing translation.
The feeling of home pulled me back again in November. I returned to Jingdezhen for three weeks, allowing the city to unfold in its gentle, familiar way. I walked its streets as if retracing steps from another life, meeting makers who shared their craft with a sense of lineage that felt both ancient and welcoming. The connections formed were not brief encounters—they felt like reconnections, as if I had stepped back into a story I had momentarily stepped away from.
This exhibition is my offering to that lineage and to the sense of belonging it stirred.
The Chinese ceramic forms that guide me—the bowl that holds silence, the vessel that stands like a guardian, the jar that cradles breath—carry an old intelligence of form and presence. They are more than vessels; they feel like spiritual thresholds. When I make, I stand at that threshold, listening for what wants to be shaped.
My own pieces rise from this conversation across cultures and time. Blue and white surfaces echo my Western heritage; decals and sculptural marks drift across them like symbols or fragments from a dream. The work becomes a place where influences merge—quietly, naturally—like two currents meeting under the surface of still water.
Each vessel stands on reclaimed timber from my back fence—material once meant to divide, now transformed into a platform of elevation. It feels like a small ritual act: turning a boundary into a bridge, lifting the work beyond utility and allowing it to be experienced as presence, as story, as spirit.
The imagery living on the vessels—a woman in song, a tipsy monkey, a tattooed panda, a tiger dressed in calm authority—functions like a series of gentle guides. They’re playful, yet symbolic, inviting viewers to enter the work intuitively, to find their own meanings, to let the pieces speak in the quiet language of imagination. The vessels become companions in this process—more than objects, they’re holders of mystery, waiting for the stories the viewer brings.
