Johan Creten was making ceramics before clay became a fashionable material for fine artists; so he commands a certain respect for working with these materials for so long. However it is his drawings that I want to showcase for this blog, especially as I'm also someone who makes ceramics and draws. However, unlike myself, he treats the drawn element of his work as a discrete area of practice. Each drawing is a stand alone image, one that often occupies the space of drawing in a similar way to how his ceramic objects occupy architectural space. But as soon as I write this, I realise that he can also occupy space in a more painterly way. Whichever way is foregrounded, I think its worth having a look at the relationship between his drawings and his ceramics, even if only to help myself think through how and why I use the same materials.
In the drawings above it is a sense of insides shaping outsides that most interests me. They feel as if the internal marks compact together to locate the outside. In this way I personally then find these drawings excellent vehicles for carrying human form. Instead of thinking of drawing a body from the outside appearance, it helps me to think that you could draw a body by using internal analogies, some marks being bones, others muscles and others internal organs.
Johan Creten: Drawings
There is a blunt directness about his drawing that I find very powerful and he uses the materials of drawing in such a way that they remain what they are, whilst also being able to represent ideas for ceramics.
Johan Creten: Ceramic forms
Creten works on a scale that is a reflection of his status and now works in bronze as well as clay. I am very aware of the type of technical support and equipment needed to make ceramic and cast metal objects of this size. It is perhaps best if I therefore concentrate on presenting his drawings rather than his sculptures. In fact I find some of his sculptures overly finished and too predictable. He has achieved a high level of control over the years and I'm very aware that in my own ceramic work I don't have that control but its the surprise of not knowing that keeps things fresh for myself and I still see that in his drawings.
Ceramics Now has an article about his recent work which you can access here.
This is the second post of the year devoted to future plans, (my new year's resolutions) and it is focused on my thoughts in relation to more sculptural concerns. As well as working small, I make objects that could be considered as 'furniture' for the mind. I think of them as furniture, as these are objects made to have a similar size relationship with people and are designed to play out roles within a space in a similar way to how I remember the furniture in our family house when I was a boy. Like actual household furniture, they can support *'tranculments'; objects put in drawers or niches or placed upon the sculptures as if they were shelving units or tables. This secondary display works to enable second order ideas to interact with the main formal construction. I have continued to collect thrown away items from my local streets, and to build constructions around them that shift between animal, vegetable and mineral realities; often using cardboard as the main building material, (a response to the ubiquitous Amazon deliveries and consequential need to dispose of many cardboard boxes). I have now decided that I need to begin varying the surface qualities of the objects I'm making, whilst at the same time preserving my constructions' abilities to have embedded within them or placed upon them, those odd items I find discarded by others, as well as objects that I make myself. (I think I will buy a robust blender to explore making my own paper, as Wangechi Mutu suggests.)
Making forms from cardboard and tape
Hybrid objects with found and made objects placed on them
Drawings of possibilities for 'furniture' sculpture
As I was drawing these forms it occurred to me that I could embed screens into the surfaces and make animations to play on them. I was in particular reminded of a radiogram with TV setup that my father once had.
Radiogram/TV
Idea for an animation insert
I was drawing the furniture/sculpture ideas on brown paper to echo the cardboard aesthetic that I had been dealing with, so I decided to use the same paper to draw a simple animation on, then I could test out how a moving image might sit within the forms I was thinking about, whilst keeping some sort of material connection. The radiogram wasn't the only item of furniture I was thinking about. A table with its crisp folded tablecloth, always sat ready for action in my grandparents' dining room and I wanted to make something that echoed this. The table was also a place where you could play and dream of alternative realities, so I have been making components to set out my own version of my grandparents' table.
Table thoughts
The remembered table objects of my youth animate themselves in drawing
These are in their own ways all imaginary tables
Some of the objects that have been made have forms sitting nicely between animal/human/inorganic ways of being. This ambiguity feels right and as I move on with this area of work, I would like to add in other ideas such as having some items being electroplated whilst also being component parts of larger forms, an idea I was thinking about a few months ago, but which I had to shelve because I was unable to stand to make sculpture due to suffering a severe case of plantar fasciitis.
An object with inserts
Realised objects exhibited
I've written about the animist world view several times, but it is in the making of objects that perhaps it is at its most succinct. A material can talk to you. As you work with it a common language develops that comes from a symbiosis between your own materiality and the demands of whatever material you are working with. It is this 'voice' that speaks with a tongue beyond myself, and that has a wisdom beyond the mind; a material knowledge.
Cardboard form with chair
Objects talk to each other and develop narratives as soon as they are conjoined. In the case above the chair and the cardboard form evoke a missing human and yet within their own realities move on beyond the human, intimating a post-human world, where wood and cardboard will find their own way.
Object built in response to a plastic chair
The 'creature' above evolved from a plastic chair, the arms of which became 'insect legs', another type of hybrid, that eventually had a cascade of plastic artificial ivy emerging from a hole in its carapace.
Sometimes a surface evolves that requires a different type of approach. The construction below began with a push along toy and parts of a Barbie House, both found in my street. The black and white drawings used to cover the surface and respond formally to the discarded toys, came from Steve Carrick's studio, and he brought them to me to use in any way I wanted. A collaboration with another artist, is not that dissimilar to a collaboration with a new material.
An idea begins
The idea evolves
The idea sparks off related ideas
Forms begin to merge
Back in Steve Carrick's studio the process continues
These objects have their own language, one that evolves as they come into being. In this case I realised that the surface had to have its own 'say' and once I allowed this to happen, a totally new (to myself) aesthetic began to emerge and this is why I have decided to explore surfaces far more during this new year.
I am still using clay, and this allows me to have a conversation with the earth. It in effect grounds me and provides me with casts of my fingers, as well as allows me to make objects that can act as inserts or additional forms, that can be implanted or embedded into the 'furniture' as it comes into being. I also use clay to tap into my unconscious. As I squeeze it and pull it, forms suggest themselves and this is another way to find what you were not looking for.
Because this body of work sits to one side of the research I'm doing in relation to the visualisation of interoceptual experiences, I have also decided to collect some of the documentation together and make a small artist's book. In particular, because I use recycled materials and am keen to promote this, I recycle these sculptures once they have been exhibited. Their shelf life is very short, but the ideas live on in the sculpture's documentation. By in one way signalling to myself that this run of thinking has come to a sort of conclusion, it hopefully allows me to take a slightly different tack.
As an artist embedded within a local community, I have also been having conversations and making drawn responses to what I believe are animist modes of thinking; types of behaviour that I particularly find in the ways that people engage with the objects and furniture in their homes. I also want to compare my findings with how people think about possessions who have been totally dispossessed of all their worldly goods and who have had to seek new homes in often strange new environments. These conversations are being made alongside the making of ‘objective’ drawings of people's 'significant objects' in order to come to some sort of ‘understanding’ of what is happening, conversations that when returned to inform the direction in which I take the drawings. The resulting images are then used to help formulate what could be described as imagery for secular myths. The second stage of this work is to merge the ideas emerging from this work into the implications that I think are coming out of the existing three dimensional aspects of my practice. In particular I am hoping that this area of research will effect the types of objects that act as inserts or additional forms, that I will use to engage with the furniture sized 'sentinel' constructions planned. All of which comes under a heading of 'home is a belief', something I'm going to have to write a separate post about.
*Tranculments: a Black Country word meaning 'ornaments and decorative objects typically found on mantlepieces, window ledges and other places around the house where mementoes can be displayed.
Over the weekend I went to see the 'Material Environments' exhibition at the Leeds Tetley for the final time. This is an exhibition I have visited several times because it both demonstrates how to build an exhibition around very particular spaces and how to embed a theme across a variety of artists working in quite diverse ways. As someone focused on drawing and with an interest in ceramics I was fascinated by the work of Phoebe Cummings. She makes organic ceramic environments using unfired clay. In order to preserve the work she was doing, the whole area had been encased in a temporary polythene structure, which meant that you had to enter the space as you would a field hospital operation area or temporary on site police forensic lab via a pull aside transparent plastic doorway. Her title 'A ripening surveillance' suggesting perhaps poly-tunnels for forced plant growth, conjoined with a paranoid need for constant vigilance. Cummings draws with clay, linking one botanical idea to another as she combines both hand made and shallow relief cast forms into imagined landscapes of 3D drawings of seemingly alien flora. The fact that you had to enter her space in the way you did, emphasised its alien nature, reminding me of the way in the film ET the government operatives sealed off the domestic middle class home environment, thus signifying that it was now potentially toxic. The alien is always seen as dangerous. We have this week been reminded of how potent the nerve agent novichok is, and images of makeshift plastic environments have again been dominating the media, as police seek to find the source of novichok contamination. Cummings in making her triffid like constructions reminds us of the continuing unsettling presence of things we don't really understand. Clay, that primeval substance, the basic building material out of which according to the Bible God created man, still has a deep resonance as something that comes up from the bottom of river beds and allows us to think about a chthonic inception of forms. As it states in Job 10.8-12, 'Remember that you have made me like clay,' but so is a golem also a clay made creature. As a material clay holds within itself infinite possibilities, like all forms of drawing, the maker needs to first of all attune themselves to the nature of the interrelationship between a material and the way it can be shaped.
Phoebe Cummings: A Ripening Surveillance (2018)
Richard Long encounters clay on his walks through the natural world. He collects the clay from river beds and uses it to form hand drawn images on the walls of galleries, thus reminding us of the tension that exists between the geometric structures erected by people and the constant grinding of materials down into mud, which will eventually be the fate of all earthly materials both human and non human made. Location is very important to him and his works remind us that what is in the earth has had a powerful impact on how human beings have survived.
Richard Long
Richard Long: detail
Richard Long: Cornish china clay on wall
In the image directly above, the fact that Long is using Cornish china clay is a very important aspect of the meaning of the drawing. China clay is called 'China Clay' because porcelain was for hundreds of years only available from China, and kaolin, (China Clay) is a fine grained white clay found in Cornwall, a fact that was responsible for the development of Cornish clay mining. The drawing suggests the map of an underground labyrinth, its simplicity however suggesting a symbol for a labyrinth, rather than a reflection of the complexity of real underground mining tunnels, such as those set out in the map below.
US Geological survey: Shafts and tunnels of
the Comstock mines
A coin from Knossos depicting the labyrinth
If you compare the image on the coin above to Long's work, you can see that they are part of the same image family. The coin depicts a symbol for the labyrinth, again all complexity and asymmetry is removed in order to facilitate the clarity of the design.
The
artist Yusuke Asai uses locally sourced clays and dirt to construct his complex
mythological images, which he develops into immersive environments by drawing across floors and walls. He is
interested in the fact that,“Seeds grow in it and it is
home to many insects and microorganisms”. It is, he states “A ‘living'
medium.”
Yusuke Asai
"I accepted the ephemeral nature of dirt as a medium from the moment I started painting with it. Once dry, paint cannot be wiped away, but with the addition of water dirt can be removed from a surface. I have been doing this type of earth painting since 2008 and most of these works have already disappeared! There is a desire for artwork to be permanent, but to try and keep it forever would mean that my painting would become unnatural. When I erase the painting it is sad, but within the context of the natural world, everything is temporary". Yusuke Asai
Asai taps into his own subconscious when creating these drawings, drawings that sit somewhere between a sort of imagined folk art and the images of a previously undiscovered culture. This is world creation at a vey high level. By using mud, clay and dirt, (dirt when wet is mud) Asai is able to feel much more connected to nature and he accepts the fact that his work will only be temporary. When I went to see the work of Phoebe Cummings this weekend it was already cracking and falling apart, all of these artists embrace entropy. As soon as any drawing or other artwork is made it is beginning to slowly fall apart, but this process is usually so slow that we don't notice it. However by embracing this as part of the artwork the artist can open out the connections that the work makes into the natural life path of those who experience it.
Rudolf Arnheim wrote a classic essay on these issues; 'Entropy and Art: An essay on Disorder and Order', which was an attempt to reconcile the contradiction between our need for order and the fact that everything is in reality in a state of entropy or chaos. Clay it would seem to me embodies within itself all of the issues that Arnheim unpicks. It comes from the soil, or from river beds, in many ways it is sourced by removing it from the chaos of nature. It has an ability to be formed when wet into a variety of forms because of its plasticity, and is hard and brittle on drying. The processes of creative formation are flexible and malleable, but once the forming stops, the clay begins to dry and become brittle, in its rigidity it becomes fragile and suspect to entropy.
So finally what am I getting at here? Bergson used the concept ‘élan vital’ to describe a force inside all living beings that motivated them to continue, what we might call 'the life force'. Bergson was suggesting that life itself was a creative process, something that Prigogine calls a self-organizing dissipative structure, driven by non-equilibrium flows of energy. I.e. the active forming process is a self-organising one, one that reflects the possibilities in the organisational structures of life itself. This ‘élan vital’ it could then be argued is something that runs through everything, not just living things and that all materials have the potential to be formed into others, they just need to be in interaction with whatever they find themselves in contact with.
Brie Ruals is an artist that digs holes, piles up earth, sits in the surf and generally embeds herself into the earth from which she sources her clay. Her whole body is involved in clay drawing, and anyone interested in this type of work should research her.
