Only Artists - Writer Tracy Chevalier meets ceramicist and author Edmund de Waal

I came across a fascinating conversation between the writer Tracy Chevalier and the ceramicist and author Edmund de Waal when catching up on older episodes of the BBC Radio 4 programme, Only Artists.

Tracy Chevalier has written eight novels including the international best-seller Girl with a Pearl Earring. Her latest book 'A Single Thread' is set in Winchester Cathedral. 



Edmund de Waal is a ceramicist and author. His book 'The Hare with Amber Eyes' is a family biography about the loss and survival of art objects through time. His porcelain installations often respond to history, museum collections and archives.

 

The conversation took place sat at the potter's wheel in Edmund de Waal's studio. As de Waal demonstrated the process of making a small cup, he spoke of the importance of touch and the connection with the material.



Chevalier agreed and the two authors discussed how, when writing they use pen and paper as opposed to using a computer because their mind is connected to the hand which is connected to the paper, and they think at the pace of writing, not typing. Chevalier also noted how she likes to be able to see the 'road maps' of edits - the bits that she has crossed out, the mistakes and edits. Although 'track changes' does a similar job, she finds these hard to follow. Both shared the importance of feeling what they are doing without overworking it; for de Waal this is in clay, for Chevalier, this is in words. 

Chevalier spoke about the importance of authenticity, and remarked that she can't write about something well unless she has done it herself. 

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m00094hg

Sara Moorhouse in Centre for Ceramic Art (CoCA) at York Art Gallery

The first work I encountered in the Centre for Ceramic Art (CoCA) at York Art Gallery was Arable Landscape: the assemblage by Sara Moorhouse. I was immediately drawn to the collection by Sara's choices of colour and the layered design.



"The wall sculpture refers to a wide open arable landscape, where colours connect across the dominant hues of red, green and blue to represent different shapes and spaces.

The pieces are hand thrown and turned, the movement of the wheel often reflected in the slight asymmetry of the form. The lines are applied by returning the bisque fired bowl to the wheel and painted with ceramic colour by hand. A matt glaze is then applied to stabilize and enhance the coloured surface."

http://saramoorhouse.com/

Cheeseburn Open Weekend July 2019 - Becky Mackenzie Ceramics

Over the past couple of Open Weekends at Cheeseburn, Northumberland-based ceramicist Becky Mackenzie has been exhibiting her work. Becky Mackenzie is a ceramic designer and maker specialising in elegant and minimal pieces in very fine porcelain, bone china and earthenware.


Such thin and delicate forms are created through the slip casting process. However, it is not possible to achieve the signs of the hands using slip casting alone. She achieves this by first throwing a vessel. The resulting form has traces of the hand; the human element that went into creating the form. Mackenzie then pours the slip into the form and, when set, the indentations and gestures made by the hands when throwing the pot are transferred to the cast.


I really enjoy the non-decorative simplicity of the forms and the signs of the making process that are evident in the vessels themselves. I'm also rather partial to the colour scheme!

http://www.lagomceramics.uk/

http://cheeseburn.com/

Preparing for Cheeseburn Sculpture June 2019 Open Weekend

In preparation for the next Open Weekend at Cheeseburn Sculpture on 29th and 30th June 2019, local maker David Kirkland is busy working on his collection of ceramic bird boxes.

David owns some woodland about 20 miles from the Cheeseburn estate. It is here that David digs the clay from which they are made, which he then processes back at his home in Newcastle. 

All are fired to 1250C, which makes them frostproof - they will outlast the tree or wall they are attached to!  

New boxes are designed to RSPB specifications to suit a range of specific bird species. Some of the new boxes will be textured to look rock-like, achieved by making glazes from rocks David collects from Northumberland, and wood ash from his fire. Other new boxes will be unglazed, but heavily textured (like the picture example), allowing the character of the Northumbrian clay they are made from to be seen.

 

Emma Hart: BANGER at The Fruitmarket Gallery, Edinburgh

The Fruitmarket Gallery is one of my favourite galleries. I rarely leave disappointed, whether that be due to the reliably top class exhibitions or the excellent range of art and culture publications available in the shop. Located right next to Edinburgh Waverley train station, it is often my first point of call on any trip up to the Scottish capital. My recent visit was no exception. 

I had no prior knowledge of the work of Emma Hart, and this made for an excellent treat. I was immediately attracted visually to the sculptural installation that greeted me in the downstairs gallery. 

"The exhibition presents two bodies of work that represent the most recent developments in her artistic practice: Mamma Mia! (2017), a major installation made following a residency in Italy awarded as part of the Max Mara Art Prize for Women that Hart won in 2016; and a group of new sculptures collectively titled BANGER (2018) made since Mamma Mia! and in response both to it and to the space of The Fruitmarket Gallery.

Mamma Mia! (2017), consists of ten large ceramic objects which hang from the ceiling, while an eleventh lies sidelong on the floor. The objects simultaneously resemble heads, upturned measuring jugs and lamps. They are glossy and monochrome, and project large speech bubbles onto the floor, some of them periodically sliced through by the shadows of ceiling fans made of oversized cutlery. As you move around and under the forms you become aware that the interior of each is a riot of intensely coloured, highly inventive pattern. The patterns used, ranging from the violent to the humorous, suggest the cyclical nature of anxieties and addictions, as well as the habitual repetitions of everyday life.

  

Upstairs in BANGER, viewers are faced with Just Because You’re Paranoid Doesn’t Mean They Aren’t After You. Headlights in a rear-view mirror, the work has you projecting forward and looking back, thinking about what’s behind you before you turn left into the rest of the space. And when you do turn, you find yourself face to face with the first in a series of four double-sided sculptures, car windscreens that stand, like road signs, around the gallery. On one side – the outside – you see into the inside of a car. On the other – the inside – you look out to the outside. The sculptures are made from handmade ceramic tiles, closely tessellated in such a way that the same shapes make different images on each side.



The four major sculptures, Green Light, Give Way, Wipe Out and X, are joined by others that direct and affect how you navigate the space – peering at and under the car bonnet of Fix Up; standing square onto the steering wheels of Race You to the Bottom; moving past Gatecrasher, both a safety barrier and a drawing of a car that seems to have crashed into the gallery wall; and tracking the movement of the woman of Wind Down as she winds herself face first down into the gutter and receives a splash in the face.

Throughout the gallery, visual and verbal puns bring things together and apart, both simplifying and complicating your looking as you ’get’ – or maybe struggle to get – the idea. Multiple ways of looking at each sculpture emerge the more you look. This shift in viewpoints plays out in the dual meaning of words like viewpoint and perspective, which are both about actual processes of looking and also about one’s worldview."

I was fascinated to discover that Mamma Mia! is the result of a residency in Italy in which she had "access to lessons about the Milan Systems Approach, a systemic and constructivist method of family therapy at the Scuola Mara Selvini Palazzoli which involves physical re-enactments and the study of repeated actions. The body of work is the culmination of an investigation into pattern, from visual patterns to patterns of psychological behaviour. The work also looks at the design and rupture of pattern and the ruminations in between."

http://www.emmahart.info/HartBanger2018.html

http://www.emmahart.info/

https://www.whitechapelgallery.org/about/press/max-mara-art-prize-women-emma-hart/

Making ceramic discs for Lyres of Lemnicate

On Friday Bex and I made real progress making the ceramic discs. We loaded 6 shelves worth of discs into the kiln and left them to fire over the weekend. The discs are extremely fragile, and even transferring them from the work surface to the kiln shelf can break them. Inevitably, we lost a few during this process.

In the evening I got mastered the art of untangling guitar strings. I then looped them at the end and attached them to the lyres.

We then spent a long time attempting to get the e-bows in the correct position so that they would create the vibrations necessary for the Humbukkers to pick up the sound. Unfortunately by 10pm we had not succeeded, and we decided to call it a day, hoping that we would be fresher in the morning after some sleep.

Working on the Lyres with Drone Ensemble

Last night Drone Ensemble had a studio visit from Paul from Workplace Gallery and Lee from TUSK. We showed them the lyres and talked through where we are at in terms of making the ceramic discs, the film and our plans for the curation of the exhibition.

Afterwards, we worked on getting the e-bow mechanism positioned correctly so that when it is in contact with the string, it is activated and makes a sound. 



Jamie showed us the system he is building that will enable manipulation of the signals going to each speaker. This introduces an aspect of interaction, and the audience will be able to use a joystick to control the vibrations of the different speakers.



We tested different ways in which the ceramic discs could be installed so that they vibrate over the speakers enough so as to make a sound and have the potential to fall off, but not too much so as to immediately fall off and smash. This is something that requires further thought and experimentation!

Serena Korda - Missing Time at BALTIC

"Serena Korda works across performance, sound and sculpture reconsidering aspects of communion and tradition in our lives. Korda is the 2016-17 Norma Lipman & BALTIC Fellow in Ceramic Sculpture at Newcastle University, a two-year residency that culminates in this exhibition.

During her fellowship, Korda has drawn inspiration from her location and the people she has met. She has become fascinated by the sound of stars from the dark skies of Northumberland, only audible with specific radio devices, and the pre-radar acoustic sound mirrors dotted along the North East coastline that attempted to detect the sound of enemy planes up until 1919.

During her research, Korda has explored planetary harmonics using homemade radio telescopes to pick up the sound of our galaxy. The particular frequencies derived from the planets, otherwise known as the ‘Music of the Spheres’, were believed during the Renaissance period to have a direct effect on the human psyche. Inspired by these different ways of listening, the potential healing power of sounds and their use as a way of communicating, Korda has created a series of large ceramic dish-shaped portals that act as sound resonators. Working alongside North East-based a capella group Mouthful (Katherine Zeseron, Bex Mathers, Dave Camlin and Sharon Durant), Korda has created a sound work that plays with the harmonics of each portal and a powerful live performance that touches on invisible forces, consciousness and what lies beyond planet Earth."

It is wonderful that BALTIC is currently exhibiting solo exhibitions by women in each of it's galleries, and with the quality of the artwork and hugh standard of the exhibitions, I really hope that this is not the only time it will happen.

Korda's ceramics are beautiful objects containing patterns and marks that resemble marble while also appearing painterly and washy. I was intrigued to find out that the technique used to form the patterns is Nerikomi, a Japanese technique "in which the clay is stained different colours, rolled into a sausage shape, sliced and rolled back together for a marbled finish with runs right through the body of the dish. Korda then scraped back the surface" to reveal more layers. 

I'm looking forward to going to her sonic performance in March.

SHIO KUSAKA

I am looking forward to seeing the work of Shio Kusaka at the Modern Institute next week.