Angela Valamanesh

Born 1953, Port Pirie, South Australia 

The journey which artists take, over time, is sometimes unexpectedly distinguished by abrupt change in the methods and mores of their art making. The propensity of artists to courageously enter new conceptual terrain is of course the very stuff of innovation, without which evolution does not occur.

A ceramic artist of reputation and considerable sensibility, Angela Valamanesh has responded to this impulse for change, firstly by enlarging her vocabulary of materials into sculptural objects of mixed media and, more recently, by extending these ambitiously as installation. In Birds Have Fled, the narrative is constructed not as explicit meanings, but as 'felt' apprehensions of metaphysical space, transition and loss. In this, a universe of pleasurable darkness permeated with the translucent blue of a back–lit quotation from Colette, is punctured by stellar islands of white light. A door is slightly ajar – a corner is piled with remnant anthropomorphous shells – a body is swallowed by the wall.

Ross Wolfe from the 1996 Samstag catalogue, Samstag's Class of '96
 
1996 Anne & Gordon Samstag International Visual Arts Scholarship
1996 Postgraduate Program, Glasgow School of Art, Scotland, United Kingdom
1993 Master of Arts (Visual Arts), South Australian School of Art, University of South Australia, Adelaide, Australia 
1977 Diploma in Design (Ceramics), South Australian School of Art, Adelaide