A shared enchantment contemporary enamelling floor talk

Enjoy an hour of conversation with enamellers Helen Aitken-Kuhnen and Mio Kuhnen and Drill Hall Gallery curators in conjunction with the exhibition A Shared Enchantment: Japanese, Australian and New Zealand Contemporary Enamelling.

A shared enchantment brings together Japanese, Australian and New Zealand enamelling artists Tsuruya Sakurai, Kazuko Inomata, Hiroki Iwata, Helen Aitken-Kuhnen, Mio Kuhnen and Jasmine Watson. Japanese enamelling Master and teacher Tsuruya Sakurai provides the link between the artists, emulating the centuries old tradition of cultural exchange in the multifaceted development of the craft of enamelling. The exhibition showcases the extraordinary technical sophistication and challenging medium of enamelling, in both traditional and contemporary craft forms.

Enamel decoration, unlike many other forms of applied art, appears in the history of virtually all of the world's great cultures. The ancient Greeks, the Romans, the medieval Europeans, the Mughals, and the Chinese all had their own enamel techniques. They created works of great interest, but it was not until the nineteenth century in the hands of Japanese artists that cloisonné enamel achieved its ultimate potential. Sublimely beautiful and technically awe-inspiring, works emerging from Japan's enamel production centres at Nagoya, Tokyo, and Kyoto reached a level of refinement unseen in the works of any of the other great enameling traditions (Japanese cloisonne enamel: The Stephen W. Fisher Collection. Gary Vikan, Director, The Walters Art Museum, Baltimore).

A Shared Enchantment: Japanese, Australian and New Zealand Contemporary Enamelling shows at the Drill Hall Gallery from 25 June - 15 August 2021.