• Juz Kitson •

Juz Kitson’s works are resplendent and dense. Complex and large scale, they are exquisite musings on nature’s cycles of metamorphosis, decay, beauty and abundance. As a contemporary multi-disciplinary artist, Kitson pushes the boundaries of material and meaning through her sculptural works. Kitson has mastered the use of porcelain and other clay bodies through intricate hand-building and slip casting. Like alchemy, Kitson incorporates these ceramic elements with hot and flameworked glass and natural materials, such as reclaimed animal pelts and furs and husks and tusks. The seductive combination of the construction and assemblage with hand built forms and found objects couple to form Kitson’s unsettling evocative morphologies.
Since her debut in Primavera at the Museum of Contemporary Art in 2012, Art Dubai in 2014, Australia platform at Artstage Singapore 2014 and the Adelaide Biennale (2016) Kitson has exhibited extensively both nationally and internationally with solo shows in Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, London, Japan and Beijing.
Kitson’s work continues to gain critical acclaim as a prize finalist including the Wynne Prize (Highly Commended 2022) (2017), the Sidney Myer Fund Australian Ceramic Award (2019) and The Alice Prize (2018). Her work is held in public collections, including the National Gallery of Australia, Art Gallery of South Australia, Artbank, RMIT University, Westpac Bank as well as in private collections in Australia, Germany and the UK.

• Artist Biography •

Juz Kitson lures her audience into an opulent garden and casts them out renewed: an encounter with her sublime installations provokes deeply affective responses, suggesting a form of contemporary shamanism at play within the gallery.

Kitson’s talismanic objects – memento mori meets animist fetish – combine the dexterous arts of ceramics, textiles and drawing with a strong sense of materialism and process. Overtly seductive, the works’ tension lies in resisting the conventions of crafts such as the throwing wheel and the plinth, both central to ceramic traditions. Bound with mystique and feminine power, Kitson’s suspended chimeras become both captivating and unnerving, touching gently on a raw, surrealist nerve.

A wanderer and gatherer, Sydney-born Kitson had, until the pandemic, divided her time between the South Coast of Australia and Jingdezhen, the ‘Ancient Porcelain City’ of China. While completing Honours in ceramics at the National Art School, Kitson’s ‘Formations of Silence’ was acquired by David Walsh for his Museum of Old and New Art in Tasmania. Featured in The Museum of Contemporary Art’s Primavera 2013 and Art Dubai 2014, she was also included in the Adelaide Biennial 2016. She has been a finalist in numerous major prizes including the Sidney Myer Fund Australian Ceramic Award (2019), The Alice Prize (2018) and the Wynne Prize (2022, 2017). Kitson’s work is held in public collections including the National Gallery of Australia, the Art Gallery of South Australia, Artbank, the Powerhouse Museum, the Wollongong Art Gallery, the Newcastle Art Gallery, the Bathurst Art Gallery and RMIT University, as well as in private collections in Australia, Germany and the UK.

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