Viridian Artists is pleased to present an exhibition of porcelain sculptures by Saba Besier. The exhibition begins July 18 and continues through August 12 with an Opening Reception Saturday, July 22, 4–6pm and a closing reception Saturday, August 12, 4–6pm. The artist will give a talk on the last Saturday of the show at 4pm.

Saba Besier’s aquatic sculptures of porcelain were referred to as “mutant beauties” when her art was recently written about in Terrain Magazine. The artist has continued to create works that combine her interest in science fiction and her ongoing concern about what’s happening in our oceans with the sculptural objects that are being presented in her first solo exhibition at Viridian Artists.

The creation of these “mutant beauties” was first inspired when she collaborated with her father to create a collection of stylized botanicals together, mixing watercolor and photography, works which found a market in hotels and luxury design. After her father’s passing, she re-examined her artistic career and began experimenting three-dimensionally with new materials and creating imagery from her memories of the hidden worlds in the oceans of Polynesia that she had once seen through a glass-bottomed boat.

Porcelain, with its luminosity, has become her new medium. She feels it adds “an element of hope to the despondency of my subject,” the oceanic life of plants and sea-creatures.

The artist has found that the required mastery of craft techniques and a mixing of unlikely media satisfies her need to meld her formal art training with alchemy to create these “freaks of nature.” Besier has produced works which are truly beautiful and arresting in their complexity and uniqueness.

Saba Besier’s artworks continue to honor and remind us of the unique underwater creatures and flora that are being depleted in our disrupted ecosystem, for she brings to life these nearly lost organisms under the sea with her other-worldly sculptural creations.