Elevated topographies and shifting cartographies
Over the past weeks, and throughout my whole L6 year, I have struggled to come to terms with what my ceramics do. In making them I am exploring site, form and physicality. As the base ceramic becomes a terrain - an idea expanded over the year (see fig. 1) - this produces a site in which to extract potential in what the work can physically embrace as a support. Expanding on my CCS framework of exploring the withdrawn, this series of artefacts act as a metaphor for existence. The criticality that the work produces is upon transporting the work into the realm of the precarious. It is here where the work possesses a potency to invoke attributes of the fragile, hazardous or uncertain. My intention is to invite a narrative of the environmental or ecological. There is plenty that can be extracted from using this as a contextual framework and “critical device” [1]
Fig. 1 One of my first bases for the non-functional pots I have been producing.
My latest expansion of the non-functional idea (right) is produced by starting to throw a pot and then letting chance accident happen in the process to stop the pot becoming a pot. Left is a non ceramic base from earlier in the year.
Fig. 2
Fig. 3 A concrete wood assemblage for the Accidental Properties series.
By constructing each artwork as an assemblage, I create interdependencies. These dependencies not only work physically but also metaphysically. The Physical element being the supported levels and metaphysically, the sense or inferences of danger, balance or hierarchy. Fig. 3 contains aa artefact on a ‘plinth’, where as in fig. 4 the artefact has been cast in two halves. So, these artefacts work through levels as well as acoss cartographies.
Fig. 5 The fissure carries on through the terrain and resonates as affect in the sited object. This work is not about division more about what we find in the division.
By deciding to slice the non-functional pot into two halves when the clay is wet and just cast, allows the rupture to resonate not only in the base, but continue into the placed object. (see fig. 5 above and fig. 6 above right)
Fig. 7 MDF wood bases before they go into the finishing workshop.
Above left (fig. 7a) are four wooden plinths, the structural basis for the ceramics. Right (fig. 7b) The plinth is shown in an earlier wooden form. (see also fig. 10) The plateaus took form in concrete cast in the corners of plastic containers of various sorts. The latest variants, having fissures and fragments throughout the base , I found the the fired ceramic bases need something to support them. This element of the series has been developmental over the year. In context they add to the elevation, a theme consistent throughout. (see fig. 8a-d)
Fig. 4 A wood base for a ceramic that works with displacement.
Fig. 6 The separated object across various terrains.
It is in the act of re-joining that that the initial rupture is exposed as an act that needs resolution. The putting back together, elements of the divided, demonstrates states of repair via consultation. Suddenly this work is not about display but a more serious questioning of place, location and siting, via taxonomies. Yet, like today, our own positioning as a species is in doubt with the anthropocene looming over us in return.[2] So, what happens to ground, terrain, and that which support bieng, on the terms of existence?
Fig. 7b Accidental Properties: Essential Qualities. (continuous series 2019 - 2022)
Fig. 10 First inception of the Accidental Properties Series
This year has not really been about making art perse, but more so answering a question… what does my work do? In the gallery below, we get to see a body of work that is starting to develop a conversation. Yes sure there are elements of the natural, the environmental and the aesthetic, but these works go beyond. If even only for a short while we get a displacement and a sense of the uncanny, it is in this time/space that the work has affected its relationality to what we know of shape and form. For me these works these works are now a continuum. They are a statement of how work can be evolutional, not only as culturally descriptive term but also as developmental assessment of my practice. This whole series of work has come about from sitting in the ceramics studio in the summer between the end of L5 and L6. Little did I know that from taking a body of clay and seeing ‘what if?’, (fig. 9) and making a first accidental pottery, would then turn into a core part of my practice, is a real demonstration of how I have engaged in process, embraced method and sought to learn what it is the work I produce does.
Fig. 9 The first accidental pottery of my degree.
[1] Andreas Fischer, ‘Post-Critical Painting’, Beyond Critique: Contemporary Art in Theory, Practice and Instruction, ed. by Pamela Fraser and Roger Rothman, (New York: Bloomsbury, 2017) pp. 113 – 128 Fischer draws point to the context in which Rancière uses the term Critical device.
[2] I use Timothy Morton’s example here where he draws upon data set posited by Cesare Imiliani’s definition of the Holocene. Cesare Imiliani, ‘Calendar Reform’, Nature, no. 366, (1993), pp. 716–716 <https://doi.org/10.1038/366716b0> [accessed 19/11/2021] Imiliani dates the Holocene as period that includes the current Georgian calendar to 12,021 years. Included within this period is a proposed but not verified timespan that dates, from an arbitrary mid twentieth century point, coined the Anthropocene (see Paul Crutzen and the Sub commission on Quaternary Stratigraphy).