The Gesamtkunstwerk Bowl

The Gesamtkunstwerk Bowl Gesamt = Total Kunst = Art Werk = Work Final year students @CSADceramics were set the challenge to identify and distil the core characteristics of their practice into the form of a ‘bowl’ and have generated a rich platform on Which they will now build their final body of degree show work.

Llantarnam Grange Saturday 1st December until January 14th 2019

1. Andrea Pykett The bowl is a versatile object; it can hold food, liquid, act as a storage for other smaller objects and all the while, it is a simple form, familiar throughout history and across the globe. My work builds on this familiarity by exploring the bonds and connections between people, between family and friends and the strangers we pass by on the street.

The connecting point between my ideas and the bowl is human connection. The work is functional, to be used in a home where people interact with them on a daily basis, at a family meal time where

everyone sits down together and communicates with one another, to become a conversation starter.

The shape of the bowl is kept simple, open forms to invite people to look inside, to peer in and find a story told across its surface. Within a family, everyone might have a favourite plate, bowl or mug; something they always eat or drink out of, I take that idea and turn it into something even more personal, extending it to a dinner set, with a collective image with serving dishes that tie the narratives together, just like a family.

2. Yixia Lin I am interested in how the division of space in architecture can change our movement and action, how modern buildings can become more like sculptures, like a spiral staircase fitting well into the natural environment through its simplicity and elegant form. This leads me to the organic shape of the bowl.

We physically interact with our environment, the balance of our body responding as we walk on uneven stepping stones. It is the same when we hold and use a bowl, ourbody clasps and responds in synergy with the size and circumference of its form.

A building divides space into inside and outside, performing the function of containing, people, furniture, the air, just as the bowl contains rice, soup, tea. Both define a threshold, as Peter Zumthor describes: thresholds, crossings, the tiny loop-hole door, the almost imperceptible transition between the inside and the outside, an incredible sense of place, an unbelievable feeling of concentration when we suddenly become aware of being enclosed, of something enveloping us, keeping us together, holding us whether be many or single. Yixia Lin

3. Cameron Benn Design infiltrates all elements of our environment. My ideas derive from the city, from London, a site of insatiable innovation yet possessing sheer beauty as a minimized horizon line.

The sharpness and minimal elements of my practice are to challenge everyday perception of a functional piece of art, to question what a bowl could be, rather than demonstrate what it has already been in our homes, on our tables and shelves.

I produce forms on the plaster lathe, creating a mould to produce multiple outcomes. The white Porcelain enhances their outline and creates an undulating, calming presence for a viewer. The clear glaze and pastel colours create a soothing balance, inviting viewers to examine the work more closely.

4. Cristina Sabater-Hayes Ceramics as a medium can infiltrate both art and the everyday. My work utilises this, to bring an environmental message into the home, politics is fused with functionality to prompt debate into peoples everyday lives.

Our seas are warming and our coral reefs are bleached and dying. Fuelled by the need to raise awareness of the consequence of pollution, I create fragile bone like structures and nestle within them bright colourful porcelain bowls, to draw awareness of what is happening in our seas and as a sign of hope and life.

I enjoy the juxtaposition between function and social message. Ceramics has a place in so many aspects of our lives and has a huge part in the relationship we have with food and drink. Being able to touch and hold a bowl is personal and intimate, unlike artwork hanging on a wall. I want my ceramics to make use of the eating ritual to frame peoples thinking.

This tableware should be readily available to be owned, handled and used everyday, and the message transmitted as it is being used.

5. Jasper Smith ‘Change’ is a word that can conjure feelings of unease, joy or confusion, but it is within that moment that our habits of perceiving can shift.

Through the bringing together of disparate objects, I hope to bring about an ‘otherness’ in things. The change in context can loosen objects from their common day meanings, cause you to question their function and intent, and allow them to become something else more absurd and fun. Transforming objects previously seen as normal or mundane.

It is important to note that all objects can exist as a form of levity, that joy can occur by seeing something light and bizarre in our ordinary encounters.

This experience can extend beyond the artefacts themselves, the mismatching of supposed intent bringing a kind of joy to those attempting to interpret them.

6. Nam Pornrattanawanarom My work is a balance between function and ornamentation. I play with material and shape, bringing the contrast of wood and clay to create unique forms. These natural materials narrate my childhood, reflecting how nature has played a role in my life.

The colour and texture show the earth; the layers of the environment, they also show the journey of how clay is formed into art work.

The work is fired at high temperature to create the richest colour to move the work away from being simple objects and instead conjure a magical world of experience. The functionality of the work doesn’t mean it can’t tell a story. The natural materials and glazing tell tales of sensation, the comfort of being touched and held.

7. Lucy Thwaites This bowl is not meant to be a functional vessel but a reminder of how fragile life can be. Influenced by the edge of land, specifically the coastal line of St Ives, the forms reflect the accumulation and erosion of boarders, the calmness of a horizon and the chaos of its detail.

The surface reflects those details that often go unnoticed, fragility and impermanence, stillness and uncertainty.

8. Johnathan English The aim in the creation of this series of vessels was to create slipcast ceramic non-functional, anthropomorphic artforms which convey my interpretation of the G- bowl. Vessels which engage the onlooker, conveying a sense of tension, both through the use of taut red satin cotton, which weaves through each object, and the positioning of the objects at curation.

The shape for this exercise was very important, a form with no foot-ring which just balances precariously as if it might actually just roll off the plinth, or tumble off the edge of its shelf. When positioned carefully on the edge of which it is capable of resting over the void with less than 25% of its form resting over the surface. Therefore creating the precarious effect which I desired for this bowl.

The use of fine bone china clay in this process for me was equally important, this medium adding to the fragility of the pieces.

Having only low fired this material again exacerbates the fragility of this body of work. More porous and non-vitreous the subjects

once polished with beeswax took on an eggshell like aspect which though extremely tactile exude a perceptible vulnerability.

The delicate feel of this work is accentuated by the tight, visceral aspect of the interwoven crimson thread. An interesting outcome, to me, was by threading these objects in different ways the forms became individual and felt completely different the one from the other. Some draw the beholder deeper into the vessel while others close the object off as if refusing access. This effect opens further discourse which paves the way for future projects.

Finally the use of a broken shattered bowl on the floor, speaks of a work which has succumbed, and ultimately accomplished its goal, a loud voice telling of the jeopardy facing the rest of the collective. So with this warning and only at this point do I feel my work complete.

9. Hannah Gourlay The process of making often involves an interplay of conscious and unconscious decisions. I intuitively form plaster structures that are cast into fine porcelain, their surface is then affected by the alchemy of Raku specifically the warm, reactive flair of rose and yellows caused by ferric chloride.

The use of natural, combustible, site found materials enables me to capture the energy of landscape and nature.

The process generates distinct colour patterns, but it also enables me to create pieces imbued with materials from a distinct location, a favourite walk, a sacred place.

The technical process of forming and exploring surface properties is imminently adaptable, offering possibilities from single ornamental pieces, larger interactive forms to installation.

10. Ady Barker A photograph can only represent a millisecond in time, never the fullerdepiction of a subject achieved through prolonged study. I have always drawn since early childhood. It has been a way of tapping into a hidden logic, a method of imposing order on an existence otherwise outside of juvenile control. Before linguistic skills are developed, drawing and making become preverbal communication, they enable us to explore a subject by engaging with it with such intensity, a kind of meditation, that new knowledge can arise.

Sketching repeatedly from life and photographic images I try to create perceptions of a subject that cut through the Etymological haze and offer a direct connection to the essence of its experience. Omitting the unnecessary to identify the significant, encouraging a viewer to engage with a higher level of awareness.

Whereas a canvas or sheet of paper is flat allowing only 2D representation, a vessel provides a 3D view, hiding some areas while pushing others forward, urging the observer to move around to change their viewpoint to gain access to the picture as a whole.

Just as in life, where we can only catch glimpses of the subject at any one time, relying on memories of previous viewpoints to piece together a more completed image.

It is a process similar to martial arts training, pushing one’s physical capabilities through mental application and a process of repetition, striving to attain the perfect form. Knowing that the better one becomes the better one can be. Every form performed with the greatest endeavour, will provide greater possibilities.

11. Elin Hughes Working with clay can teach us the value of patience, something which has become scarce and undervalued in our current society.

The experience of time in relation to making is central to my practice. Through the stilling of clay as it slowly centres on the wheel-head, I enter into a different time zone where the material has control over my experience.

Throwing on the potter’s wheel becomes a method of quiet introspection where tensions in my subconscious manifest themselves in the finished vessels. I find a place of refuge in this sphere of stillness, a meditative zone reflected in the soft curves of the forms and subtlety of glaze.

My practice is characterised by the balance between imposing my own design on the clay and surrendering control to the vitality of materials.

Rather than painting on patterns, I prefer to leave the surfaces of my pots at the mercy of the kiln.

Flames from the reduction firing leave traces of the action and movement of the firing process in the form of flushes of colour and fluidity of running glaze.

As a result the vessel surfaces become as American writer Harold Rosenberg said of Abstract Expressionism: ’not carriers of images but [carriers] of events’

12. Sassy raw This work may reference the vessel and follow the history of traditional Japanese tea bowls but it poses a contradiction, although made specifically small to be pleasing to hold they will not contain liquid. They serve instead as ornament, their surface marked by the unpredictable and experimental effects of raku.

Raku captures the experimental, the joy of surprise in not knowing how the surface will look when it comes out of the kiln. It captures the organic, the natural energy of flame and smoke. It summons ‘perfect imperfection’ a crackle glaze crazing across their form.

Tea bowls are often made in response to a season - a low, wide-rim bowl used in summer to enable the tea to cool quickly, and in winter more commonly narrow and tall, so the tea remains hot for longer. My bowls may serve as ornament but they are designed for the summer, to tempt the audience to want to grasp them in their hands.

13 Olivia Antonio My work represents the human figure, those parts of a body that are usually hidden, expressing a sensuality and intimacy.

I build a relationship with the vessels through the long process of coil building exploring the form in clay as I have explored the form through drawing from life. I gather knowledge of the body through sketching, capturing the figures gesture and movement and coiling reflects this sensitivity.

Porcelain slip then creates the skin texture and sponged on oxides the expression of skin pores.

Finally, the tin foil saggar adds a responsive layer requiring the forms to be literally undressed to reveal the sensual qualities of the human condition.

14. Lucy Jenkins I am a designer who uses plaster moulds and processes to create functional pieces which can alter in use between containment and light.

The use of plaster allows me to create multiple objects with different aesthetics, explore sensory properties and positive and negative space.

The basic bowl form displays an evolving pattern suggestive of movement and growth. The corresponding feet are the transforming element raising the form off a surface or adding a further components to a light fixture.

15. Liam Clayton Boundaries offer the ability to create little compartmentalized worlds, allowing each to have its own separate stream of sensory information and as such impose a radically different experience to any person moving between them.

I think the spaces that most interest me are the ones that give a feeling of calm and stillness as these are two things I struggle to achieve. Being enveloped in this tranquility offers an escape from my own world for a while and blurs the boundaries between myself and the space around me.

Within the space of the bowl separate spaces can be formed, and boundaries redefined. The combination of form and surface conspires to place me within those walls, allowing me to imagine exploring this crystallized momentary mini reality.

Space, we move through it every day. Be it outside or inside, in the clouds or underground. We travel from destination to destination chasing our latest objective, most of the time hardly considering where we are beyond how to get to where we need to go.

Everything we can perceive exists within space and yet we often consider it synonymous with emptiness.

In our human world, space defines the distance between boundaries, a parking space is the empty bit between two lines and outer space is the empty bit between rock and gas. It is this perceived division of infinity and the difference in human sensation between each compartment of that reality, that truly fascinates me.

16. Adlina My work is autobiographical, reflective of my own transculturation of Malay, Pakistani, and Western cultures.

I explore this through pattern, specifically combining slip trailing techniques with art of Batik and Henna. This blending of traditional art forms is to speak about cultural fusion and to celebrate the beauty of skin.

The bowl is taken as metaphor, presenting both inner and outer self. The overlay of decal, screen printing and slip beings the identity of those processes together sharing floral motif and quality of line.

Melted glass enhance their interaction as if their identities are in constant conversation as with all identity, living, adapting and vibrant.