Teresa Peters is an artist and filmmaker based in Tamaki Makaurau, currently working
in clay and ceramics, photography and moving image. She is interested in bodies, earth bodies, forming
and transforming. Chemical compounds and molten entities, in intimate
combustion. ‘Excavating’ primordial totems’, as we move on into the
sixth mass extinction. Ceramics is alchemy. Earth, water, air… fire...
VANITAS - PORTRAIT AS LANDSCAPE – continues to explore value systems in
times of late capitalism. Echoing into the timeless, but referencing the
tradition of Vanitas paintings of 17th Century Europe. Subverting the
glory of traditional art categories, Vanitas were established as
symbolic works of transience of life, futility of pleasure and the
certainty of death. These works, often juxtaposing symbols of wealth
with those of ephemerality.
Human skulls. Composting fruit and flowers. Bubbles. Smoke. Music. Fire. Time.
Revisited in contemporary times, by artists from Jana Sterbak to Damien
Hirst, Vanitas meaning vanity, emptiness, futility or worthlessness in
Latin. The Biblical view was that earthly goods and pursuits are
transient and worthless. "Vanity of vanities. All is vanity."
Ecclesiastes 1:2 succinctly describes the Vanitas movement that began in
response to the imperial prosperity in 17th century Holland, These
works created to remind us that our vanity or material possessions and
pursuits do not preclude us from death, response – ability or earth’s
transitory laws.
