JUZ KITSON

b. 1987

Juz Kitson is currently based in Jingdezhen China the Ancient Porcelain city and Australia. She graduated from The National Art School in 2009 and has exhibited regularly both nationally and internationally since 2005 in solo and group exhibitions. Most notable, solo shows at Australia Platform ArtStage Singapore, London Art Fair project space, GAGPROJECTS/ Greenaway Art Gallery, Jan Murphy Gallery Brisbane and Zero Art Centre in 798 Art district, Beijing and in 2013 she was included in Primevara at the Museum of Contemporary Art and the 2016 Adelaide Biennial of Contemporary Australian Art. In 2011 she participated in a National Art School Residency for Emerging Artists from NSW, supported by Arts NSW, at the Tshingua University Academy of Art and Design, Beijing along with being awarded the Bundanon Residency, Arthur Boyd Trust and Bathurst Regional Art Gallery Hill End Residencies. Numerous articles have been published about her practice in Australian Art Collector, Australian Art Review, The Australian newspaper, The Journal of Australian Ceramics, China Ceramic Artist magazine and Vogue Living.

While completing Honours in ceramics at the National Art School, Kitson’s Formations of Silence was acquired by David Walsh for his Museum of Old and New (MONA) in Tasmania. Kitson’s work is held in public collections, including the Art Gallery of South Australia, Artbank, RMIT University collection, Shepparton Gallery, Bathurst Regional Art Gallery, as well as in private collections in Australia, China, Japan, France, Germany and the UK.

Juz Kitson’s installations represent the all-encompassing taxonomic display of both human and animal condition, through the push and pull of ambiguity and abjection and motivated heavily on the writing’s of Julia Kristivas ‘Power of Horror’ and Sogyal Rinpoche’s The ‘Tibetan book of Living and Dying’, through collections of absurd materiality that incorporate inanimate objects and reclaimed animal pelts, husks and tusks sourced through the rugged terrain of the Australian landscape and full of boundless, inimitable desire through the morphing of hand formed pure porcelaneous objects made while in Jingdezhen China, the Ancient Porcelain city, endlessly celebrating the vital importance of both life and death, eros and thanatos and the constant reminder of our own materiality. These corporeal installations full and imbued with hidden meaning are raw and absurdly familiar; yet so unfamiliar. Objects no longer represent parts of body, but rather embody literally being ‘cast off’ and now represent human emotion and condition. They are soft, tender and inviting, luscious and satisfying, warm and comforting yet possibly dangerously threatening, they are something monstrous, abnormal and obscene yet oddly beautiful, they intend to hold their presence in any given space, classical in symmetry and strength and powerful without words, these sublimated ‘beings’ will be able to exist on their own terms. The objects found; through foraging over land or salvaging through Antique markets become re-contextualised, they refer to a human reaction, a feeling, a moment in time.