Scarlet Aylmer - BA (Hons) Fine Art
The Banquet
Scarlets work manipulates the boundaries between states of being, perforating a sense of flux between the domestic, grotesque and sublime . Her work exudes the hodgepodge maximalism of festival decor and her mother's prodigious craft drawer, taking on a kitsch, camp, almost surrealist attitude
Her practice can be situated within the domestic sphere of artists whose introspective works move past the confines of the gendered body, celebrating it’s abjectivity and flow between creation, ingestion and expulsion. Exploiting the immeasurable gap between perception and imagination, she plays on our desires to consume, in a tortured stasis between compulsion and restraint
Recent works fuse ceramic and glass with different methods of fusing, firing, slumping and blowing to freeze in time a sense of movement that mourns the active forces of the making process. There is an underscore of intimacy and care found in the way she works through a range of mediums, mastering and manipulating each one in relation to the next. To mesmerise in the same light that glitter’s garish flicker can also be seen in the delicy of dust caught in lamplight, or street lights on wet tarmac. With a joyful campiness , Scarlet challenges established binaries and celebrates an unapologetic sense of ugliness. Her art transforms the mundane into the mesmerizing and the natural into the unsettling, with a sense of critique.
Scarlet questions our connection to the sparkling commercialism of modern society, in its deceptive mimicking qualities, creating facades that encrust themselves upon the desires of modern times. Titillating, teasing, oozing, deceiving, subverting, Scarlet disregards the comfort of space between juxtaposing forces, to leave room for conflict within ourselves and our desires.
