Domestic Disturbance is a ceramics installation by former Nelson, and now United States, based artist Caroline Earley. It is a response, in part, to Earley's return to the United States after sixteen years in New Zealand.

Established in the vessel tradition, Earley's practice incorporates hand, wheel and industrial approaches. Drawing on her interests in science, politics and cultural issues, Domestic Disturbance presents a monochromatic installation of distorted ceramic domestic ware; a table covered with uncanny bulbous and contorted forms, all in pristine white. These ceramic volumes are enclosed and non-functional, expressing some of the nature of Earley's disquiet and discomfort with American domestic politics.

Earley states, "Domestic Disturbance engages the traditional form of the ceramic table setting to ‘set an uncanny table' for an unexpected experience. Form, appendage and surface elements come together in ways that reference domestic ware, but serve up a meal of warped, unusable forms and enclosed volumes, which fold back on themselves and push against the confines of their contained space.

"The work is based, in part, on how my perceptions of self have been altered by a recent move back to the United States after sixteen years living in New Zealand. It is informed by the multitude of strange moments I have encountered, feeling like an immigrant in my own country. The territory triggers memory, yet is altogether unfamiliar. It also feeds on the dysfunctional domestic politics of the US, where very little makes sense in a system that has become bloated and misshapen. Extreme distortions have replaced what once at least passed for truth."

Laura Howard

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Caroline Earley is currently Assistant Professor of Art - Ceramics at Boise State University, Idaho, USA. From 2005 - 2010 she was a lecturer in visual arts at the Nelson Marlborough Institute of Technology (NMIT). She has a BFA in ceramics from Ohio University (Summa Cum Laude) and an MFA in ceramics from the University of Wisconsin. Domestic Disturbance was exhibited at The Suter Art Gallery, Nelson in 2011.