This Ceramics Contemporaries is the fourth in a series of exhibitions that represents a coming of age of ceramic art and education in Britain. The title implies an art practice that is discrete, evolving and innovatory. These new ideas emerge from a particular context - that of art education within an institute of higher learning. The exhibitors, young and not-so-young, are all recent graduates.

The exhibition is also the product of choices by the selectors, eminent figures in their own right: two practitioners, one critic/writer and one designer for industry, none of whom is a full-time teacher. The aim was to avoid any possibility of institutional bias. The work was selected from slides submitted by the artists and the selectors were given no other information beyond the title, size and material. Unlike the selectors, I had the opportunity of reading a brief piece of information from most of the artists.

This essay is entitled ‘Buzzwords’ or ‘The Things People Say’. Alongside the images I have tried to draw out key words or concepts articulated by recently educated ceramic artists as they describe their work. Given the nature of higher education, all will have had to do this at some level in their training. No visual artist would argue that the words are a substitute for the work - but words are implicated in artistic presentation for better or worse. The artist’s statement is a literary form in itself. In this case each maker has been asked to write fifty words to support the work and from these pithy testimonies we can pull out some common concerns and some surprising contrasts.

Clay talk

Some makers are wary of the prescriptive nature of words. They don’t want to direct the viewer and hence ‘close off avenues of thought’ (Anderson). They want the viewer to come ‘innocent’ to the work, to respond from the heart not the head. As John Blackwell says ‘Let the clay speak for itself’. Formed in a period of introspection, his distressed and fractured terracotta heads are disturbing expressions of the human spirit. In a very different way Martin Lungley wants to ‘let the pieces tell the story of their making’. He is showing a tea set with minimalist tea cups revealing pronounced throwing rings and impressed finger indentations and an elemental thrown bowl, Drift. Both are centrally about the narrative of process.

Text

Other makers deploy the power of words adding resonance to the visual experience through titles or text inscribed on the work. Encouraged on her course at Stoke-on-Trent to think about current trends in tableware, Joanna Hartrup explores the revival of interest in eighties’ popular culture through a combination of image and text. She uses an elaborate process that starts from making textile puppets and moves through photography, computer manipulation and transfer printing, to end with multiple firings. Inscribed on her work, phrases such as ‘Rusty razor blades’, ‘Anarchy in the UK’ or ‘Get into the Groove’ invoke the era of Punk and Madonna as much as the visual imagery of safety pins, pouting lips and outrageous dresses.

Title

Many of the works in this exhibition have titles of some kind: a few are simply descriptive such as Hedgehog tool shed (Walsh), Tower Form (Wearing) or St Edward the Confessor (Silverton) but the majority of makers choose evocative, even poetic, one-liners that avoid specific references: Bound (Chaney), Drift (Lungley) Balance and Growth (McLuskie), In Passing (Casey), Canyon (Rupp), and Winsome (Nancarrow). Eileen Newell emphasises her classical allusions with titles such as Certus and Superbia. Emilie Taylor goes for something much more hard-hitting. In one of the few overtly political works in the exhibition, she shows a set of bowls with antler horns. The piece is entitled First Blood but the artist has also considered alternatives in Doe, a deer a female deer or Last Supper. Such fluctuating titles allude to both feminist and anti-blood sports readings of these archetypal vessels. The hunting ritual of smearing the hunter’s cheeks with the blood of the dead animal after the first kill is identified as a masculine rite of passage. To the artist it is a symbol of patriarchal power over the natural world in turn linked with feminine symbols: a dead doe, menstrual blood or the vessel as womb. Bizarre juxtaposition of nature and culture, antlers and artefact this haunting work relies on verbal as well as visual play.
Perhaps surprisingly, popular culture is not a major inspiration in the exhibits; however, where it is, titles are all important. Mike Amorelli’s Great Big Fancy might suggest a cake or a sundae rather than a ceramic slice of gruyère cheese while Carole Windham uses the model of the Staffordshire flatback to ‘take the piss with respect’. The two works to be shown are drawn from her Souvenirs of World Art series. Bacon Bits is a collage of imagery drawn from the work of Frances Bacon and Proud to be Shits has the performance artists Gilbert and George sitting back to back against a huge gin bottle. Craft gets its own back at Fine Art for once.

Contrasts

There are two basic polarities that divide a large number of the artists: those whose inspiration comes from the natural world where keywords include ‘nature’, ‘landscape’ and ‘geology’ and, those who find the industrial aesthetic a rich source of imagery and stimulation. But these two are by no means self excluding. Trevor Hogan’s TPOT66 combines a rock-like body sharply intersected by the clean industrial tubes that form the ‘handle’ and spout’. Both Nicolas Lees and Anil Patel cite contrasts of organic and mechanical as spurs to their abstract sculptural work. Others use different contrasting concepts: art and function in Jonna Behrens gestural plate decoration or order and disorder, growth and decay in Paul Wearing’s sculpture.

Landscape/geology

For Akira Curtis the horse embodies contrasts such as ‘strength and vulnerability, eternity and mutability, certainty and uncertainty’, qualities that are set against environmental factors of climate and geology. Grand aspirations perhaps, but Horse Head with its loose shape and craggy surface evokes just such abstractions rather than any descriptive animal quality.
Andy Glass’s handsome vessels are inspired by landscape elements of cliffs, beaches, geology, and quarries while geological processes are similarly invoked in Max Hodgetts wood-fired vessels and Libby McLuskie’s sculptures. Ashley Howard uses high fired stoneware with layers of glazing in multiple firings ‘draped’ over the form to suggest the effects of time and weathering.

Industry

Industrial imagery constitutes the essential vocabulary of another group of artists of whom the most uncompromising minimalist is Ailsa O’Leary who employs industrial refractory cement in Pre-Cast 1 a 12 piece sculpture based on the basic geometry of square and circle. Its power lies in its denial of every seductive or human quality that normally attracts. The industrial chimney is the source of inspiration for both Kristen Godfrey and Steve Brown but the outcomes are very different. Godfrey’s elegant group is entitled Tubular Family while Brown’s are printed with pictorial and historical imagery using corroding metals and brick dust. Industrial materials are thus an integral part of the work.

Technology

Another word that comes up is technology. Keith Hamilton using installation and video makes a play on the relationship between electrical energy and ceramic in a Heath Robinson-like game of firing. But as you might expect the word also appears in relation to digital technology. Barney Barford uses modelling software and prototyping techniques to make works out of repeated elements but the whole is greater than the sum of the parts. Technology is tamed and transformed to deliver an altogether more organic or poetic reading. Justin Marshall uses computer technology in his development of tiles with tessellated relief patterns that can be assembled to give various effects. Marshall is a pioneer in that new form of art practice which produces the exhibition piece alongside research in higher education. The social context of such work arises in part from an education system that increasingly demands from art institutions something akin to scientific research. Artists have always responded to new opportunities and this is a fine example.

Body

Working out a of a similar context of study for a PhD, Natasha Mayo is exploring the potential of ceramic to express flesh and skin; her sculpture is one of the most powerful pieces of figurative work in the show. Figurative work is not a major aspect of the exhibition but the concept of ceramic form as metaphor for the body is cited by a number of vessel makers including Kay Suckling, Anil Patel and Taryn Childs whose multi-chambered forms are sensual evocations of African and Maasai imagery. Jonathan Keep makes baggy, biological forms, unexpectedly beautiful references to body parts. Alternatively Fiona Meagher’s skeletal dresses made from cast lids or stoppers are conceived as ‘packaging for the body’. In very different ways both Eileen Newell’s sensitively modelled heads and Valeria Merlo’s Spoon Woman draw on classical sources to convey a poignant sense of human vulnerability.

Porcelain

Every kind of ceramic body is covered in the many different techniques represented but there is one material which deserves a special mention for its significance to so many of the artists. Porcelain, long associated with expensive tableware and ornaments, is now revealing a remarkable versatility. To give two examples, Liz Monk manipulates slabs of porcelain to create serene forms that convey the delicacy and plasticity of the material while Terence Casey models and uses it as a casting slip to freeze a moment in time and capture the process of death and decay.

Technicalities

Of the major forming techniques throwing is represented by a number of artists mainly to deploy the vitality and dynamic of spinning clay, as in Kiya Nancarrow’s vigorous sculptures or Geoff Wilcock’s delicately striated vessels. However, it would be difficult to derive any evidence from this exhibition of a return to throwing as Alison Britton has recently reported.1 Hand-building, coiling and modelling are used but mainly as a means to an end. With a few exceptions, such as Taryn Childs, they are not central to the interpretation. The most frequently used technique is one that has not traditionally been used by ceramic artists but has gained in status over the last decade. The supposedly industrial techniques of slip-casting and press moulding are widely used, sometimes with an ironic reference to the factory process. Examples include Paul McAllister, Fiona Meagher or Hanne Rysgaard whose stackable tableware carries multiple messages: functionality, Tupperware, stylish Danish design and downmarket Englishness in the chintzy transfer prints applied in bands to the pristine white surfaces.
Potters’ pyromania is little in evidence and few lay much emphasis on firing. Marian Anderson’s installation, however, incorporates four different firing techniques to create ‘difference’ in the slip-cast porcelain balls that are the basic element in her work. Simple forms create a rich aesthetic effect and open themselves up to abundant avenues of thought suggested in the poem that accompanies the work.

Significant Form

What can this exhibition tell us about the concerns of recent graduates and ceramic artists launching their careers at the beginning of the third millennium? The oriental influence has largely disappeared from the field, and specific cultural and historical references are only occasional players; post-modernism is side-lined. But I think I might propose a category of ‘New Modernism’ and taking this even further consider Clive Bell’s phrase ‘Significant Form’.2 The aspiration for many of these ceramic artists is to create a ceramic work that communicates existential meanings - abstract ideas, feelings, memories or personal identity. The vehicle may be abstract sculpture, vessel, stylised figure or conceptual domestic object but the intention is to convey a deeper, dare I say, spiritual content.

1 Alison Britton ‘Overthrowing Tradition’, a talk at Camberwell College of Arts, Jan. 2001. See Interpreting Ceramics, Issue 002: www.uwic.ac.uk/ICRC.
2 Clive Bell (1881-1964) published his influential book Art in 1914. He proposed that ‘significant form’ was the essential quality in art and that it existed independently of representational or symbolic form. His ideas helped to open the way for the acceptance of Modernism and abstract art in Britain.