Of bodies into novel shapes : Kohl Tyler

Kohl Tyler is an Aotearoa/New Zealand-born artist who’s been based in Naarm/Melbourne since 2018. In her practice, Kohl Tyler contemplates notions of ephemerality, interconnectedness and one’s place within the cosmos. Drawing inspiration from both physical and phenomenal elements of the natural world she processes her ecological grief, making work that posits future ecologies, imagined organic remnants and investigates the natural archive. She works across ceramic sculpture, watercolour painting, and social practice.

Tyler completed a Bachelor of Fine Art at Whitecliffe College of Art and Design in 2016 and was awarded the Artist Alliance Graduate Award in 2016. In 2017, she won the Estuary Art and Ecology Award at Malcolm Smith Gallery in Auckland, NZ. She has presented solo exhibitions in Aotearoa and Australia including; All is Ephemeral, FELTspace, Adelaide, SA (2024), Signals, Printmaker Gallery, Melbourne, VIC (2022), and Moving Past the Sun, Weasel Gallery, Hamilton, NZ (2020). In 2022 she presented Offerings, a social art installation held at the UNESCO heritage-listed Carlton Gardens in Naarm, Australia, supported by the City of Melbourne Art Grants. Her work is held in the collection of the Gippsland Art Gallery, VIC and in private collections throughout Australia and Aotearoa.

Of bodies into novel shapes

The title of this show, and of some of the works that comprise it, are borrowed from Ovid’s Metamorphoses, a sweeping narrative poem of 15 books, weaving together over 250 myths centred on change and transformation, where gods, humans, and nature shift forms—people turn into animals, plants, stars, or stones.

So much of what gives meaning to life and art is flux; shifting, evolving, transforming. Nothing ever still, nor the same. This aspect of life is hyperreal in artmaking; Distilled. We take earthly material like clay, and we inflict upon it time, labour, process and our thoughts, until it is wrought anew, and imbued with meaning.

Reading Metamorphoses we understand this phenomenon of transformation to be a perennial fascination, and one that Tyler pushes to its technical limits in her new solo show. Wielding the elemental forces of heat and gravity, Tyler’s ceramic works, fired at such high vitrifying temperatures, shift, slump, twist and even crack in the kiln. A form of kintsugi is then applied to celebrate where the materials have found their limits. As usual, Tyler’s enigmatic forms appear temporally ambiguous, as if they could have either been excavated from ancient earth, or speculated from a science-fictional future. They speak to deep geologic time, fossilisation, and germination, reflecting the artist’s absorption of narratives that posit future ecological and material possibilities.