As a young art student in Bangkok in the 90s, Vipoo Srivilasa started making jewellery to sell on the side as a source of income while he was studying.
Customers loved his bold, colourful designs featuring starfish and hearts, which he made using homemade air-dried clay: a mix of powdered bread and PVC glue.
But there was one problem: the cockroaches loved them too.
"Because they were made from bread, the cockroaches were eating my work," he tells ABC RN's The Art Show. "That's when I decided I had to find another material to make my jewellery."
His search led him to ceramics, which he studied as part of his art degree at Rangsit University. It was a fortuitous decision: Srivilasa, who moved to Australia from Thailand 30 years ago, is today one of this country's most successful ceramic artists, known for his intricate, ornate and joyful sculptures glazed in blue, white and gold. His works, which are held in the collections of major galleries around Australia and internationally, explore concepts of beauty, queerness and migration.
In 2023, Srivilasa's Diverse Dominion Deities won the inaugural MAKE award, Australia's richest non-acquisitive craft award. He describes the work, which is held together with Blu Tack, as a metaphor for the diversity in Australia. "I want to show that when different cultures come together, then it won't be seamless," he told the Australian Design Centre's Object Podcast. "There's always bits and pieces that never fit." And Srivilasa's work appears in a new solo exhibition: Re/JOY, opening at the Australian Design Centre (ADC) in November. In it, the artist takes damaged keepsakes and gives them a dazzling new life.
Transforming broken treasures
Scratch around the drawers and cupboards of any home and you'll likely unearth broken mementos — shards of an old teapot or fragments of a family heirloom — too precious to throw away.
These sentimental objects are the inspiration for Re/JOY.
In 2023, Srivilasa put out a call, asking Australians born overseas for their broken ceramic treasures. He wanted people to share their stories with him — not just the story of their precious object and how it broke, but the story of how they arrived in Australia. He placed these stories of migration at the centre of a series of ceramic sculptures.
"I like to work with stories. A story is a powerful thing," he says.
Srivilasa eventually chose seven objects, all damaged in some way, including a Korean teapot, a terracotta tile from India, and a handmade dish that belonged to a woman, Emiliano, who fled the Salvadoran Civil War.He used them as the basis for the seven 1.5-metre-tall ceramic sculptures that appear in Re/JOY.
"I'm not fixing the broken works but integrating them into my sculptures," he explains. It's the process behind Re/JOY's double meaning. "The ceramic object is broken, so the joy of having it disappears when they give it to me," Srivilasa says. "But then they come back and see their broken ceramic become something else, so they are happy again."
Each sculpture is layered with meaning thanks to biographical details from the donors: berries represent one woman's experience fruit-picking, stars reflect another woman's love of the Australian night sky, while a fish head recalls a grandmother's cooking. Humour infuses the work, too: one sculpture sports an Esky for a head; in another, a dog ejects a golden stream of vomit.
An eighth, smaller work tells Srivilasa's own story of emigration. Faces adorning the sculpture's base represent the friends he's made in Australia, while red, heart-shaped eyes symbolise Srivilasa's marriage to his husband. The figure holds a flame in one hand and a ball of clay in the other — representing Srivilasa's creative life — and wears a necklace featuring a button that once belonged to his grandmother.
"When people think of immigrants they have a certain type of people in their head," Srivilasa says. "This project is to show there are different kinds of migrants here in Australia and not everyone comes here because of sadness or their country is not very good. People come for different reasons."
Clay 'a material to tell stories'
After living in Australia for three decades, Srivilasa's work is now a mix of Thai and Australian influences.
"It's really hard now to tell which part is Thai and which part Australian," he says.
But things were very different when he first arrived to study in Australia in 1996. "My first week in Melbourne was total culture shock," he recalls. "Coming from Bangkok, there is food everywhere, but in Melbourne, I was so hungry the first day because I was expecting … to go out at five o'clock and find some street food but there was nothing at all — everything was closed."
Eight years later, food would present an opportunity for Srivilasa, in a pivotal 2008 exhibition at the Centre for Contemporary Asian Art in Sydney.
Srivilasa came up with the idea of รูป รส เรื่อง Roop – Rote – Ruang (Taste – Touch – Tell), a gallery exhibition and series of dinner parties held at private residences, where Srivilasa served a five-course Thai dinner on a 105-piece dinner set he made for the show.
"This way, people are not just seeing my work but can touch it, feel it, hear it, and each meal I served, I told the story of my moving to Australia," he says. "I learnt that clay is not just a material to make sculptures; it could be a material to tell stories."
