CRITICAL REFLECTION
Ceramics in Contemporary Art
Using the soil under our feet for making ceramics is one of the oldest methods that humans used for expressing themselves. From the functional objects that they used daily, to sculptures that show their ancient cultures, beliefs and experiences. For me, seeing 2000–3000-year-old ceramic pieces had been a usual part of seeing almost any history museum in Iran since I was a kid and I always considered them a significant part of my culture. Although since I started using ceramics as the main medium of my art practice a few months ago, many new questions have been raised in my head. Not only about the amazing things that clay is capable of, but also about the role of ceramics in contemporary art and how the way the work is exhibited plays a role in it.
The exhibition “Strange Clay: Ceramics in Contemporary Art” at Hayward Gallery (26 Oct 2022 - 8 Jan 2023) is a great example of the variety of ways that ceramic is used in arts today. The similarities and conversations that I could find between the pieces that were represented in this exhibition and my art practice were educational for me and in what follows I will write about some of the works and approaches that are exhibited at Hayward Gallery for this show.
One of the first things that caught my attention in this exhibition is the playfulness and creativity of the artists in their confrontation with clay. The exhibition starts with the column-like works of Jonathan Baldock. “I am interested in how we interact emotionally” Baldock explains. “I wanted the works to communicate the things that we often find the most difficult in the present day – our feelings.” His work invites the viewer to come closer, move around the pieces and experience different emotions and thoughts while observing the work. The act of peaking in is something I also like to intrigue in the audience with my work and Baldock’s piece also encourages that urge.
Facecrime
Jonathan Baldock
Betty Woodman’s work, House of the South stands on a line between painting and sculpture. As written on the wall of the gallery: “Woodman’s monumental frieze, House of the South, features glazed ceramic fragments dispersed across a section of wall. Vessel-like forms dance and cascade down the wall, alongside lines and squiggles that suggest a sense of movement and drama. Viewed from a distance, the myriad sculptural fragments come together to set the stage of a domestic theatre.” The way the piece was coming out of the wall, would make the viewer question the way they are supposed to interact with the work as it destructs the format of traditional framed painting while being placed on the wall. I think my approach for exhibiting my piece “Containers for Love” is similar to Woodman’s way of hanging the ceramic pieces on the wall as on both pieces this feeling of objects coming out of the wall is stressed.
House of the South
Betty Woodman
A sketch of how I want to exhibit the piece 'Container for Love'
Mendick’s piece masterfully mixes familiarity and unfamiliarity. The work 'Till Death Do Part Us', focused on domestic violence, represents spaces that we live in, but with a twist. Mind of the audience might go back and forth with the image of their own home and the space of a home that Mendick has created in this work. This question came to my mind while seeing her work: “What if something like this is also happening under the skin of my house and I’m not aware of it?” This type of curiosity becomes bolder in parts of the work that you as the audience have to bend, peak in, or listen carefully to see the details coming out of a pipe or hear the song that is being played from the radio. I can spend hours looking at this work and still find beautiful details in it.
Lindsey Mendick’s piece “Till Death Do Part Us” is one of my favourites in this exhibition because of the storytelling and engaging the audiences’ mind to participate in creating narratives for the work. Her work creates its own unique environment while keeping it familiar enough, so the viewer can become a part of the world she has created. “In Mendick’s imagined household, which she has rendered from a below-ground perspective, we encounter teeming groups of ceramic vermin: navy slugs are at war in the kitchen, an octopus erupts from the toilet, wasps and moths infest the hallway, spiders crawl through water pipes and cockroaches plan cyber-attack in the living room while mice and rats feast at the dining table.”
Till Death Do Us Part
Lindsey Mendick
Brie Ruais’s work and her exploration in “bodily and psychological scars, and those created by industrial exploitation of the land” has taken another approach in the grand world of ceramics in contemporary art. In exploring themes of embodiment, her work further reflects upon the relationship between an individual's psychical interior world and the corporeal exterior world. (brieruais.com, n.d.) Ruais’s way of work is quite body centred, as she works with big bodies of clay, sometimes even heavier that her own body. Making ceramics in the size of her artworks is actual physical work and the narrative of body as home, and soil as a part of our planet as our home sits beautifully in her work.
Interlocking, 130lbs times two, (Square Knot)
Brie Ruais
Texture and colour and the duality of them is a significant part of the work of Salvatore Arancio: “A Soft Land No Longer Distant”. In my opinion this piece brings out and urge to touch for the viewer due to this duality and the glamorous glazing of the tips of the ceramic pieces. The rough black texture on the bottom leads to the soft, shiny surfaces with a rainbow glow combined with the amoeba-like forms, gives life to these objects. As if there are living creatures inside them that are struggling to come out like a volcano. The artist’s skills in glazing works hand in hand with the concept of the work.
A Soft Land No Longer Distant
Salvatore Arancio
The piece “My Place Is the Placeless” by Shahpour Pouyan was the piece that touched my heart in this exhibition. This work takes its title from a phrase in a poem by Mawlana Rumi and speaks of Pouyan’s rejection of national and ethnic labelling. A search for belonging is embedded in the title of the work which immediately caught my attention since I am researching on a similar concept through my art practice.
Four years ago, Pouyan took a genetic ancestry test. The results revealed a DNA ancestry of thirty-three modern countries spread across Central Asia, South Asia, the Middle East, Caucasus Mountains, Northern Europe and the British Isles. Some of the countries were surprising, such as Norway, Ireland and Bhutan; others less so, such as Iraq, Turkey and Saudi Arabia. Pouyan spent two years obsessively researching distinctive historic architecture from these thirty-three countries with the aim of unearthing their most significant monuments and ‘constructing’ his own identity through the language of architecture. Each sculpture is representative of a dome from a monumental building in the country of the artist’s genetic extraction as revealed by the genetic test. Some domes relate to religious buildings or places of worship while others are pure statements of grandiosity and power. (Shahpour Pouyan, 2018)
My Place Is the Placeless
Shahpour Pouyan
The artist takes a Foucauldian approach to develop a personalized genealogy of the dome, highlighting the human tendency to memorialize legacies of power, just as genetic heritage is often a record of the legacies of conquest. In addition, the organization of the domes implies a Darwinist typology where the basic form of the dome goes through various morphological transformations as a result of contact and conflict between cultures. However, the cuboid installation questions the narrative of progress by connecting the most sophisticated dome of the series back with the simplest structure, an upside ship. (Shahpour Pouyan, 2018)
The cuboid construction upon which the sculptures rest evokes the simplified forms of modernist architects from Le Corbusier to minimalist sculptors such as Donald Judd who were concerned with reducing form to its purest incarnation. Pouyan’s sculptures by contrast deliberately refer to colorful and diverse pre-modern architectural heritage and are rooted into archaic past. Each work is made from a different type of clay and glaze so that each piece is distinct; no two works appear the same, creating a sense of diversity and even disarray. By placing these objects within such a structure, Pouyan “contaminates” the chaste minimalist structure, destroying its qualities and questioning notions of purity in relation to art, architecture and anthropology. (Shahpour Pouyan, 2018)
Poyan’s work ‘My Place is the Placeless’ shows a complex diversity of forms, textures and feelings while keeping the objects united by framing them in the boundary of a home like framework. The artwork draws a line between the word ‘place’ in the title and roof and domes in the work as a roof over head. The framework also points to the idea of a cube as home and shelter. The skilful usage of different glazes on each object allows the viewer to experience the different aspects of the sense of belonging that Pouyan is discussing in his artwork.
My Place is the Placeless
Shahpour Pouyan
Another work at the ‘Strange Clay’ exhibition that was quite touching for me was Untitled by David Zink Yi which shows a five meters ceramic squid on the floor, surrounded by a liquid. Since 2010, Zink Yi has created a series of ceramic sculptures modelled on Architeuthis, a giant squid that can grow to over 14 metres long. Prominent in many legends around the world, this elusive deep-sea-dwelling creature had only ever been encountered as a dead carcass washed up on shores until scientists filmed in alive in its natural habitat in 2004. ‘I found it fascinating that there is a species in this world we can only encounter dead’ notes Zink Yi.
Untitled (Architeuthis)
David Zink Yi
The sculpture lying in the liquid (a combination of ink and corn syrup) reminded me of the containers I made for love and how I used honey in them. By talking to the securities of the Hayward Gallery I found out that the liquid in Zink Yi’s work has been slowly moving on the floor of the gallery since the opening. I find this fascinating because although the work is depicting a dead animal, the artwork has a life of its own and it is somehow alive as it changes through time.
Container for My Love for Iran
Taraneh Dana
Klara Kristalova’s installation ‘Far from here’ represented a magical forest that surprised me when I entered the room. The smell of the leaves was quite important part of the work that made the installation even more interesting. “I use symbols from my own surroundings, images I have seen, books I have read, or songs I have heard. I weave all these different sources of inspiration together in my work” Kristalova explains. The artist mixes glazes in a painterly manner, combining glossy and matt finishes. The surfaces of her works remain imperfect – colours run and blend into each other, giving her sculptures the allure of drawings or waercolours.
Far from here
Klara Kristalova
The way that Edmund de Waal had chosen to exhibit his pieces and the curation of the room was quite touching. The rectangular forms of the transparent boxes matches the rectangular form of the window of the room. A seating area was also provided for the viewers to be able to relax and get closer to the meditative feeling that is behind Waal’s work.
Atmosphere
Edmund de Waal
It was during this exhibition at Wilson Road building that I got to observe the ways that viewers interacted with my work and the installation that I had created. I realized that even though the installation was three dimensional, because of the direction that the painting and the screen were facing, most of the viewers would interact with my works from a certain angel. It was like I had encouraged them to look at the work from that side.
Exhibition at Wilson Road UAL
My first experience of exhibiting my ceramic objects was in a group exhibition at UAL Camberwell Wilson Road. The pieces I was planning to exhibit were mostly about love and relationships and they would get activated by honey being poured into them. The work included ceramic objects exhibited on ready-made plinths, a painting painted on loose canvas and a video being displayed on a screen. I had handwritten the titles of the works on the white plinths with Persian lithography ink since I had come to the conclusion that knowing the narrative behind my work has a significant impact on the way the work is understood.
I also realised that the honey was intriguing for many of the viewers and since I hadn’t mention that as a material of the work on the label, many of them had questions about it. Many wouldn’t realise that what was being displayed on the screen was a video and not an image since the movement of honey is quite slow. I noticed that many of the viewers would only become aware of the video at the final few seconds because at that point I was cleaning the honey from the surface with a spoon and the sound of spoon on the table would draw their attention towards the screen. In that exhibition I poured honey into the containers before the opening, but I also started to think about making a performance out of it for the next times.
All these observations and experimentations at the Wilson Road exhibition helped me to critically reflect on different aspects of my artworks and come up with new approaches for the next exhibitions. One of them was the idea of making a wooden box that contains all the pieces of the artwork ‘Getting Out’, and will become the stand for it as well. Also, I did a performance at the opening of my next exhibition at Copeland Gallery to activate the artwork. Sound is a part of the piece as well, which I found quite inviting for the viewers.
I am hopeful that with each exhibition that I go to or participate in, I will be able to take my research further by observing different opportunities that artists have while working with ceramics in contemporary art and learning from them, also by experimenting in exhibiting and knowing my work and its capacities better.
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References:
brieruais.com. (n.d.). BRIE RUAIS. [online] Available at: https://brieruais.com/ [Accessed 21 Nov. 2022].
2022. Strange Clay: Ceramics in Contemporary Art, Hayward Gallery, November 2022