Bone China emerged as a reflection on the relationship between synthetic and organic aesthetic properties. By fusing the two, Ramsay has attempted to create a kind of hybrid object that while alluding to both, partakes in neither.
Each Bone China piece is the result of an intuitive, meditative interaction with the piece of bone in which new volume is added and refined. This process is repeated until a final form is achieved in which the boundaries between the original, organic, and new, synthetic elements are lost. The white finish completes the work by obscuring much of the surface detail of the bone leaving behind an object that defies categorization and frustrates attempts to identify technique, material or provenance.
Bevan Ramsay’s practice may be understood as an ongoing reflection on the possibility of illustrating complex ideas through the material facts of an object and the formal relationships between its constituent parts. The work does not provide commentary on, or editorialize the subjects it deals with. Rather, it is an attempt to create physical representations or metaphors for complex phenomena.
Formal ideas are the most basic currency of his art practice, but they are also inseparable from materials and process. The practical outcome of this approach is a fixation on conceptual unity. Although the concepts he investigates are problematized in his work to create conceptual compounds, there is nevertheless an attempt to leave them with the character of a semantic whole. In this way the ideas are diffracted and collapse in upon themselves through the same material exploration.
