Home@735 Gallery director Madeleine Preston will be exhibiting a new body of work at Archive Space in Newtown opening on Wednesday the 17th of June from 6-8pm. Also showing will be artists Julia Rochford and Alex Pye with their work ‘going solo’. The show runs till July the 4th.

The works in The Tanagras Archive are based on the Louvre’s Tanagras collection. Upon their initial unearthing, these ancient Greek statuettes were coveted by France’s bourgeoisie, as they were affordable symbols of wealth and taste. I used my limited skill as a ceramicist to create rough approximations of the sophisticated Tanagras figurines and classical vase forms.

The Tanagras Archive includes a series of objects including urns and trophies that suggest both archaeology and an individual’s collection. Museum display conventions, where painting and ceramics from different eras are shown in one space, allow my work in a variety of media – ceramics, oil paintings, drawing and installation – to co-exist in a recognisable format.

The series of paintings Tanagras Archive: The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie shows bourgeois interiors where either meals or celebrations take place. Figures, when they appear, are often ghostly, and reference a culture where gourmandising takes precedence over social and political issues. They are anxious faded signs of all that is obscured by polite dinner conversation and the trappings of bourgeois culture.