Dipalee Daroz: Sculptural stoneware

Teacher and ceramic artist Dipalee Daroz mesmerizes with a stunning suite of works at Galerie Nvya (Square One) entitled 'The Altered Perspective'.

This range of works includes an irresistible set of stoneware sculptural forms. While glazes and clay bodies are dense and durable; however, the colour range is limited. Because of the varying effects of oxidation and reduction on glaze colorants, the few coloring oxides that are viable in this range can still produce a rich. But Dipalee adds a robust resonance to this limited, pale palette of deepened smoky and burnt embers woven into her firings. if much more limited, pale

"My objects are reminiscent of the historic past," says Dipalee about her sculptural stoneware. " Their rawness and spontaneity in tune with the prevailing environment of mindless violence and ruthless survival.' Dipalee says that connotative ascent of the human psyche is as significant and universal as the primal ones. She takes the example of ice age hunter-gatherers who made ceramic pots to cook fish.

She finds a comparison in the journey of the self. At Gallerie Nvya it's as if you have been invited into a journey that is akin to a time warp. There are a series of mesmerizing works that seem to look like instruments from another age-their fired matte finish glazes with smoky timbres just the right shade of juxtapositions – nothing is excessive and this entire collection is shorn of superficial embellishment.

Temperature range

" I fire my stoneware at 1280 degrees C," says Dipalee. Her quest for a clay body that vitrifies and gives both texture and colour at this temperature necessitates mixing her own recipes. Over the years at her studio at Aaya Nagar, she has perfected her love for both materiala and experimenting so spends time constantly tweaking her clay bodies.

Constantly driven by the journey which allows her to create ambiguous images and artifacts in natural and matte finish glazes to create installations and sculptures, her practice begins out of a scientific curiosity as she seeks materials that intrigue her. "I want to become involved in what the material represents and how I can transform into something beyond expectations," she adds. "My process is characterised by control and freedom, one side creating a framework and the other, usually the material, pushing back and asserting itself in little pieces and the process of overlap so I can create a sculptural ethos."

Clay body Type

Typically, mid-range clay is stoneware, a plastic clay that is often grey when moist. Getting its name from the dense, rock-like nature of the clay body when fired, stoneware is typically combined with other clays to modify it, such as ball clays which might be added for plasticity. It is important to note that stoneware is divided into two types – mid-fire and high-fire – and this section of the guide will be referring specifically to mid-fire stoneware. Dipalee excels in her choice of clay body type and the ensuing results seen in the finer details.

Fine repertoire

She seems to have a sense of urgency to her work in the period of creation as if trying to beat the passage of time, a feeling that is evidenced by the dense depth and bold gestures of creating definitive sculptural language. Dipalee is one of the finest in her finesse and repertoire-fuelled by a desire to beat the inexorable passage of time, something that led her to create with a new sense of wanting to provide something fresh and yet in many ways, reminiscent of an underlying abstract expressionism, that is not always seen in a world in which pottery has been reduced to just reproduction. In the many tendrils and projections of this brilliant culling, she emerges as a ceramic artist who fills her work with thick and visceral, irrevocable gestures that boldly declare the hand of the artist as the creator of an album of deepened elements.