Kirsten Coelho’s Ithaca presents a series of serene, graceful ceramic vessels of soft white porcelain. The pots appear timeless. Their forms of varying shape and size exhibit ancient Grecian reference points: long curved handles, slender spouts, tall columns. They sit in irregular groupings atop a tall, slender plinth that looks as if it were made of porcelain and—discernible to the observant viewer— tapers ever so slightly upwards. At a distance, the work appears both ghostly and alluring: a pedestal with an abandoned monument turned to ruin atop; a mountainous landscape upon which sepulchral remains of a civilisation now lie. The near-perfection of the sleek silvery pottery draws us in, but the incline renders the pieces unattainable, just out of reach. With this new body of work, Coelho considers the Ancient Greek poem The Odyssey, dated 900-700 BC. Attributed to Homer—although likely written by a number of authors—the story picks up after the end of Trojan War and details Odysseus’s ten-year journey home to the mythological island of Ithaca, where he is King. The epic unfolds as an exploration of voyage, longing and transformation as Odysseus’s eventual return is tarnished by the discovery that home is not as he had remembered it. Coelho’s Ithaca resembles, as does Homer’s, the place to which we strive to reach yet which remains beyond our limit. Coelho has long been captivated by The Odyssey. Born in Copenhagen in 1966, Coelho moved to North America as a child before emigrating to Australia with her family in 1972. Her eventual return as an adult to both Denmark and the U.S. proved the relatability of Odysseus’s experience. To Coelho, Homer’s text is a reminder that ‘home’ is an intangible concept, abstracted by time and the inevitability of change. It is this clear moment of realisation that the artist looks to articulate. ‘He who grasps loses’ — Coelho references Chinese philosopher Laozi to express the difficulty of searching for something elusive that was held in the mind, and the way perception and reality can be so very different.