Artist Glenn Barkley is like a walking Wikipedia; he knows a lot about many topics and you’re only a curiosity-click away from an internet rabbit hole. On Broadsheet’s visit to his Annandale studio, our conversations bounce from 20th-century poets and neolithic pottery to Donald Trump and Chappell Roan. And all of it is tied to his ceramics.
One of his recent creations – a half-metre-tall open vase – is decorated with vivid shapes and letters spelling Chappell Roan’s lyrics “565678hottogo”. Barkley tells Broadsheet he’s intrigued by America. “How can America give us Trump but also Chappell Roan?”
The US president comes up a lot because Barkley created ceramic tokens of Trump’s ear for the vases in his solo show Experimental Idiocy. “I make a lot of these tokens, so Trump’s ear occurs quite a lot,” he explains. “I bought a plaster bust of Trump and then made a mould of his ear because his ears were really good on these busts. I also bought JFK, Obama, Ronald Reagan and Herbert Hoover.”
At first glance, Barkley’s ceramic pots are colourful, irreverent and tactile – but a closer inspection reveals fragments of poetry, references to Greek art history, politics, archaeology and well-known ceramics, such as Wedgwood’s Portland vase. “I’m obsessed with the Portland vase because it’s peak Wedgwood,” he says. “I’m very aware of the motifs I use, so the things I reference are often Anglo-Saxon Australian culture, which is why I use Wedgwood quite a lot.”
Every element of Barkley’s artworks has a complex and fascinating story. There are shell shapes made from cockle shells collected near his father’s home in Sussex Inlet, New South Wales; rope shapes reference the ancient history of ceramics, specifically Corded Ware and Neolithic pottery; there are recognisably kitsch souvenirs of Aussie animals, but also Greek mythology; and Winston Churchill’s profile.
Across different vases, you’ll find phrases like “Hello! How are you?” or “Is not easy” written in ceramic letters. The first is a reference to Trump’s interview at an event hosted by the National Association of Black Journalists in early 2024. The latter is from an Ern Malley poem. “From Dürer: Innsbruck, 1495 and it says ‘Someone told me that art is not easy.’
“I’m really attracted to things that operate in that space between fine art and bad taste,” he says. “Like, how far can you go? How far can you push something? There is a really fine line between those things, and so quite often I make moulds out of souvenirs. I think it’s interesting the way we choose to represent cultures through these cheap souvenirs.”
Before Barkley was a ceramicist, he was an art curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA). He trained as a painter and came to pottery when he was 43 years old. “I think people quite often come to ceramics later [in life]. In some ways, I think I’m just a super-charged ambitious hobbyist. Nothing I do is overly technical but there’s obsession, a drive, an ambition.”
His studio is tidy and organised. There are industrial shelves with finished pots from past projects, wooden trays of pottery fragments collected from Camperdown oval and other places, reference books, plaster cast moulds purchased from arts-and-crafts sites, a shiny kiln in the corner with notes about the temperature settings, tidbits from op shops.
Though he says it’s been a strange route to where he is now, you can see the connection between his passion for art history, archaeology, painting and pottery. “I think they’re quite painterly,” he says, pointing to one of his recent works. “They’re very painterly to me.”
Glenn Barkley: Experimental Idiocy is on now at Sullivan & Strumpf until December 14.
Read more in our Studio Visit series.
