Gabi Dao

Cut-and-pasted perfume bottles spill their guts, but did the violence come from outside or perhaps from within? And who will tell the difference? Gabi Dao was inspired by flacons and snuff bottles, their shapes and decorations, the connections with wealth display and colonial “trade”. Some bottles come in pairs, some were tied in fours or fives, traces of rope around their necks and bodies. Made from porcelain, the containers conceal their priceless pure whiteness behind slightly murky glazes and discs with detailed decorations. Pesky, infectious mosquitoes and queer seahorses — we’re talking females inserting their eggs in the males’ brood pouch with an ovipositor here — appear next to paracetamol and band-aid. There are wounds to tend to, hurts to heal. Dao worked primarily with the slip-casting process and with porcelain during their EKWC residency. They hand-built clay positives and made multi-part plaster molds from these. To their cast sculptural and vessel-like forms they applied sinter-engobes, copper-saturation and Egyptian blue glazes, gold and platinum lustres, and watercolour-like, optapix-water washes with pigments and oxides.