Australian Art Review 2011

Stephen Bird’s modelled and painted ceramic works appear to reinterpret eighteenth and nineteenth-century ceramic wares which were mass-produced in factories in Stoke-on-Trent, in the English Midlands. But the subjects are subversive: investigations of contemporary suburban life, popular culture, war, violence, politics and religion, within universal themes of love, death, birth and life. He explains: “My ceramic works locate themselves in an invented world where dissonant cultural idioms come together to form a language or style I have coined ‘Industrial Sabotage’.”