Weird Afternoon: Ben King

“All the wrong colours at the right time. A weird afternoon. An old memory friend. A romantic melody.”

Text by Marianna Ebersoll

Ben King’s new show Weird Afternoon occupies a strange place. The time between 2.00 and 5.00pm. The morning’s caffeine has left the body, the mind starts wandering, the sun has exhausted itself and is contemplating leaving the room. These hours are where Ben’s plates and sculptures spend time. Apparitions of a ghost walking home, robots towering over cityscapes, faces floating amongst wet slip. “When I was a kid that would be the time I’d be making up adventures”. The mind blurs and anything becomes possible, imagination becomes reality as day slips into night, a portal to another world. 

UFOs, robots and apes become repeating characters that play out new roles on different plates: threatening, caring. Nervous laughter is allowed, as children and adults often laugh through the harder moments. In one sculpture a crouching figure with a red and glaring ape’s face looks down upon a small figurine of a boy. The rough glazed ceramic texture envelops the smooth figurine; it is hard to decide whether the monkey poses as protector or threat. Ben offers a place to sit with both; they are all and one at the same time. 

In one plate, the word ‘INTROJECTION’ appears at the bottom of a scene that is a haze of different landscapes, textures and characters. The Oxford Dictionary defines the word as “the unconscious adoption of the ideas and attitudes of others”. This plate with its many layers offers a window into the confusing task of understanding the world around us, where trauma often morphs into dream. A robot stands, knife in hand, red blood pouring downwards through the glaze, a detached figure lying beneath him. The Sydney skyline is carved into an airbrushed red fog. Floating above are two embracing figures in washed cobalt, stark blue against the red blur. The layered imagery also shows Ben’s tireless approach to working and reworking his plates, usually firing them multiple times. This murderous scene is interrupted by dots of different glaze, on glaze, Egyptian paste and separately fired tiles fused to the plate with glaze. Moving your eyes across the changing ceramic surface, the beauty of the embracing figures changes to horror, changes again to laughter upon seeing an awkwardly smiling robot in the corner. This plate, after many transformations finds itself resting as a cacophony of images, voices and emotions. Through this cacophony one can see the nature of living in this ever-changing world while hauling one’s past behind you, it’s violent, sad, beautiful and funny all at once. And Centrepoint tower watches over it all. 

Ben’s plates and sculptures don’t hide that there are some messes one just can’t clean up and that there is beauty within that too. They are far from a traditional plate, instead are rough, holes pierced through them, strange arms extending outwards from the plates jagged circle. Reaching out, they offer a portal to another world, the in-between space, the afternoon. We are invited to sit in this afternoon sun, honouring the range of emotions that bounce off the inside of our bodies like fireworks, the good and the bad and all of it in between.