Works By Daisy Boman

These characters traverse challenging terrain, and whilst they endeavour to succeed and stride forth they offer us, as viewers, to contemplate themes that in some way affect all our lives.

Citing her stable childhood as being one filled with a love of drawing, Belgium-born artist, Boman chose to turn her creative attentions to ceramics; an area in which she has specialised in during her career to date, and a field in which she quickly became widely acknowledged and hugely popular/collected. This is despite previously studying both photography and interior design whilst attending the Academy of Fine Art.

Boman’s Apartheid-inspired ceramic work has been showcased many times in Johannesburg’s National Ceramics Exhibition, after she immigrated to South Africa in 1981 on account of her husband’s architectural career. Five years later Boman returned to her native Belgium, and 12 months down the line she secured her first exhibition, held in Antwerp. Again, Boman seized this opportunity with both hands and used it to display ceramic works depicting a strong South African influence. These tend to form the mainstay of Boman’s designs and are instantly recognisable pieces, relying heavily on figurative creations in which the innovative and evocative studies are ostensibly constructed around.

Addressing what we might refer to as a signature Boman ceramic sculpture, and these habitually are more often than not abstract figures seemingly re-telling the story of the struggles, interactions and emotions indicative of contemporary human life and the journey of a modern society as a whole. Dubbed the ‘Bo-men’, the celebrated contemporary ceramic artist adapts these characters so as they are perceived to be exploring and challenging our immediate everyday environs and pose the ultimate questions of any given time.

Who are we, when are we, how and why are we? Playful and enquiring from one perspective, determined and dramatic from another, for the most part Boman’s ‘Bo-men’ identify with those who strive for more, and to this illustrative end are never better illustrated than when the characters’ are putting their best feet forward to compete, achieve and ultimately, inspire.

Typically standing some 8.25 inches tall, the Bo-men are donned in white, as Bomen feels this emphasises that neither colour nor creed matter, whilst their heads are predominantly set as square objects to symbolise the ideology that we’re all, as humans, hewn from the same mould. Bomen concurs that she routinely listens to what her little ‘Bo-men’ have to say, who – she implies - instinctively inform her as to where (and in what volume) they wish to appear on each piece. Be they positioned alone, within a group, at the front of a group, stuck behind or reaching a pinnacle. Either way Boman will be the architect of their fate.