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Bonnie Kemske Introduction
The haptic and the tacit are the ground upon which craft is built, engendered in both the making and the experiencing of the craft object. In the making, the haptic is the feel of the material in the hands or the sense of touch relayed through a tool, but what the artist does with that perception draws on the tacit - how the artist makes judgements in the making based on the embodied knowledge gained by hands-on experience. Individuals later encounter the craft objects with their hands or sense the objects’ tactile qualities in their minds, evoking a sense of elusive and unspoken qualities. The artwork in this exhibition, from five emerging artists from the Crafts Council’s 2013 Hothouse programme and their respective mentors, shows how the haptic and the tacit are embedded in the artists’ personal relationships to their materials and the techniques they employ. For example, clay can warmly invite our sense of touch, as in my Cast Hugs, or it can starkly represent the harrowing stories of contemporary life, as in Grant Aston’s skewed architectural forms. It can concentrate a particular sense of place and space, as does Kim Norton’s use of site-specific raw materials. In the work of Jane Cairns a sense of the urban gives rise to ‘an accidental poetry’. And in Annie Turner’s use of clay, we are led into an enigmatic and haunting world of river-based constructions. Thomas Appleton and Giles Macdonald work in stone, and through lettering bring language into craft, challenging our sense of what is true, or ‘set in stone’, and even the value we place on words themselves. Laura Ellen Bacon uses woven materials to create imposing large-scale structures and installations that hold us rapt in their complexity. Shelly Goldsmith explores narrative through the use of textiles, particularly reclaimed garments and the imprinted metaphors they carry, which encourage personal reflection. Laura Grain’s materials are domestic and personal objects, which she uses to set a scene and create a ‘make believe’, often challenging our sense of the normal. The mentor/mentee relationship is a special one. Each artist, whether they are mentor or mentee, can gain from the experience, and this is reflected in this exhibition. Striking connections are apparent in the work of all the pairs, yet it is clear that each artist has a dynamic and independent voice and vision.
Laura Grain/ Shelly Goldsmith Dialogue
Concept A strong concept is important to both our practices, it usually builds on the ongoing fascination with the notion that memory and experience can be ‘retrieved’ from cloth (in Shelly’s case) or objects (in Laura’s) and presented or re-invented visually. Shelly: I like to engage in thorough primary research and investigate to fully understand the central areas that support the concepts in my work and this has led me to work with a range of professions such as forensic scientists, psychiatrists and neo-natal doctors for example.
Approach Shelly: ‘Meaning through making’ has been a pertinent approach throughout my career. Although I start with a pretty good idea of what I want to achieve, the process of making questions and stimulates new opportunities and avenues to explore. Often I have to make and remake work to hone its concept as well as its physical manifestation. Ideas and plans are always much more straightforward in my head than in reality; everything takes much, much longer than one predicts and there are always many more ideas than there is time to realise. I have to be quite analytical when choosing what I move forward with. Laura: Research forms a large part of what I do as an artist whether the story I am telling is based on historical fact or is completely fictional. My research for Haptic/Tacit for example started in the historical, looking at unusual samplers from the 1800’s made by women whe were going through hardships and has ended up in the realm of the personal, when my son was born and rushed into neonatal care, undergoing lifesaving surgeries and spending a long period in several different hospitals.
Process Laura: Each new project presents an opportunity to research a new area of interest and to learn a new process, allowing me to find the process that best conveys the story being told by that particular piece. The actual making is often bound to portraying the concept; for instance with Buried in Woollen the knitting was tied up with both the idea of bringing to life a dead industry and had links to the church surroundings with the mediative repetition of the knitting not unlike the use of a rosary. Shelly: The choice of method, process and techniques are always dictated by their ability to facilitate the communication of the underlying concept in the work. I utilise a wide range of textile processes from strongly traditional to digital - sometimes I need to learn a new process to realise a piece.
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Materials Materials are always chosen to reinforce the communication of the concept. Shelly: The materials that I often use are reclaimed clothing, and this has to be just right for each piece. Materials can bring a coded, symbolic and visceral element to the work and certainly the historical and cultural significance of a chosen material can be used to strengthen a piece’s ‘story’: it is important that I get just what is needed for the piece. I have been known to travel to an open-cast coal mine to choose a piece of anthracite for a piece of work and use reclaimed dresses from Yellow Springs, Ohio for a work which explores the high incidence of tornados in this area. Laura: From ceramics to textiles to metalwork to light sensitive paper, the materials used help to tell a story. The tactile is just as important to me as the concept since the material can drastically alter the way we look at and read an object, especially when the material is unexpected.
Thomas Appleton/ Giles Macdonald Dialogue
Giles: The work I’m exhibiting comes from a stream of what I’m working on at the moment, the things I think about while I’m making. We’re both making lots of different things for lots of different people for lots of different reasons, so for me, it’s a way of stepping outside of that. Thomas: Yes, this is the work I make to explore ideas in my process and making, which somewhere down the road may inform a commissioned work. But, in this work, a lot of the time it’s about playing with ideas as much as it is about the final work. Giles: We can do perfect letters but it just becomes a sort of craft exercise. Slaving away. This area of my work is not about perfect letters, here I’m not particularly interested in that. It’s more the vitality of the work. It’s a piece of lettering. It’s lettering that says something, but it’s not immediately obvious what it says. In this case, it’s more about the pattern on the stone and what that does to you, what that feels like. Thomas: I enjoy knowing that I have the skills and capacity for commissioned work, but as you say it can become a craft exercise. I know that when I’m delivering commissioned work, I do my technical best work every time. But there are ideas that I want to play with outside of that work. And those ideas don’t need perfect lettering to be successful. As letterers we can get very involved with how letterforms are beautifully crafted, forgetting that what they really need to do is engage the viewer. Giles: And how they engage is really interesting. Thomas: Yes, sometimes it’s the tension of not being easy to read; sometimes it’s how easy they are to read. Giles: More and more I enjoy working with typefaces in stone, which I know traditionally, you’re not supposed to. Yet it feels somehow more democratic to not use my own drawn letters, but to work instead with a known font or a typeface that everyone knows and owns to some extent. I often think that someone pays to have this thing created and then somehow, through the letterer, it’s given to everyone. I see lettering not as a formal thing, but as a solidification of something more playful. I see it more as coming from that natural urge to draw in the sand - we’re just doing the same. We just work with a slightly harder, more permanent material. And as soon as its there, everyone can see it; how they respond to it is up to them.
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Thomas: There’s something about who owns the place, and I’ve liked what you’ve said in the past about lettering creating a sense of belonging in a place. I’m interested in the expected functions of public lettering from all involved - the commissioner, the letterer, the viewer. It’s easy to get distracted in complex designs when most people just need to be able to walk past it and read it - and who am I to make that hard work for them? My own work sometimes takes an alternative view, deliberately making it hard to read or understand the forms in the material - and I’m interested in how that feels, the tension of engaging with the forms themselves as much as what they are saying. I’m playing with the process and expectations of viewing as much as the process of making - and wondering how this balance works is often a starting point. Giles: It’s slightly different for me; I find it hard to get excited without the words in front of me. They need to exist and need to be carved. This can lead to working with other materials as stone doesn’t always supply the answer - and it’s interesting to become a designer rather than a designer maker. It’s a pragmatic approach to finding the right answer, which could be in glass or metal as much as in stone. Thomas: I’ve worked with letters in other media and feel that letters in stone have a particular resonance. In our culture, stone inscriptions have such a formal role. We work with material that is millions of years old, taught to use methods introduced by the Romans and often set phrases that haven’t moved on since Victorian times. And I think that, in our field, too often that limits us and there is a reverence around the letters themselves - beyond what they are there to do. Giles: We’re communicators; its about finding the right communication. There is the danger of fetishising the making of lettering. But for me it’s just about the feeling you get when you see text somewhere in an environment. It can be a really exciting thing. Thinking about how we create that feeling just frees you up to explore.
Jane Cairns/ Annie Turner Dialogue
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metaphorical objects repetition making as thinking
a sense of place (re)collection human archaeology
Grant Aston/ Bonnie Kemske Dialogue
Grant: Your practice focuses on the body and how we experience the world through it via our senses, mainly the sense(s) of touch. You cite a scientific study that suggests our sense of touch may actually be better understood as a number of senses working together. I tend to think about your work in these three categories: People How physical contact between people improves quality of life. Objects How our interaction with everyday objects improves our life. Sculpture and research How a participating audience reacts to your own work, and its societal implications. Bonnie: That’s a good way to break it down. I understand the body, and especially touch, to be what places us in the world. Touch is multi-faceted and includes qualities such as tactile discrimination, heat and cold, pressure and movement, but it also includes touch memory and imagination. This is what makes us flinch when we see someone hurt or smile when we see a child stroke a pet. Grant: Right at the start of the interview you said, ‘Life these days includes a low lying and constant sense of fear.’ Do you feel this is particular to modern living? That this results from media coverage of conflict or natural disaster? Or that we live in an increasingly impersonal or anonymous society, due to the style of busy urban life? Bonnie: I doubt that our level of fear is any less than it’s ever been, although the triggers have shifted. Human tragedy is in our lives now in very real, very graphic imagery, and often in real time, both visually and audibly, as we tune into our phones, tablets, TV and social media. We carry these images and sounds with us throughout the day, even if we are not conscious of them. No, I don’t think our society is necessarily ‘increasingly impersonal or anonymous’, but perhaps as individuals we do create internal bubbles to protect us from these horrors, and sometimes those bubbles expand, disconnecting us from the sensual groundedness of the positive aspects of our lives as well. Much contemporary art is aimed at popping these bubbles by shocking us back into a grim reality. My goal is also to pop the bubbles - but not to expose feelings of distress and anxiety, but to reveal the calm sense of comfort that lives quietly within us, sometimes hidden even from ourselves.
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Grant: You mentioned that when people hold your work they can often lose themselves in the work, lose the sense of self consciousness. There was an occasion when your work had helped a man realise that he needed more physical contact in his life, that he wanted to go home and hug his family. This got me thinking about my own work. The act of touching clay and thinking through the material seems to put the brain into a different gear. The pieces get to very different places than if I would have designed them beforehand. It is an immensely satisfying experience to engage with a material like this and something I miss when I’m away from the studio for a while. Maybe it is this need to engage with material that forms part of the drive to create. Bonnie: Like you, physical engagement with the material is essential to what I do. Further, using my body and my sense of touch in the making process overcomes some of the free-floating anxiety we carry. I guess it’s closely related to the same experience that people express when they interact with my work: a loss of self-consciousness and a positive sense of self. ‘Touching clay and thinking through the material’, as you say, ‘seems to put the brain into a different gear’. The unhappiness in the world can drop away, and it is just you and the clay, working towards some unspecified goal - on the path, unsure of the result, but having faith that something good will come out of it. I see these qualities in your work also: an immediacy and a lack of self-consciousness in your making, with structures that arise from somewhere other than just your rational thought. For me, your work speaks to our strengths in the face of the more dolorous aspects of our existence, ever anchored in our human experience.
Kim Norton/ Laura Ellen Bacon Dialogue
Key words that underpin the thinking Kim: Quiet, Weight, Density, Mass, Pressure, Sensory, Scale, Site, Space, Materiality, Process, Phenomenology, Physicality. Laura: Scale, Mass, Spectacle, Hand-tied, Enclosure, Envelopment, Uncanny, Growth, Weight, Spatial, Shelter, Retreat, Accumulation.
Approach Kim: I consider myself to be sitting on the outer edges of ceramics yet my practice is so deeply rooted within ceramics as a material. I often make work that responds to site or place. These tend to be larger in scale. Smaller collections are explored through process-led thinking. These pieces can stand alone or feed into the larger spatial experiences. I often begin working with reading and research. Sometimes it’s one word that can hold the work together; in other cases it could be striving to create a particular atmosphere or mood. It’s often being led by the need for us to slow down. Laura: Much of my work is in context to site and scale - notably a spatial experience. Material forms much of the appearance and experience of a piece but is not allowed to dictate entirely. I draw a lot, but often ‘feel’ the potential form by drawing out the shape in the air on site, to achieve a true sense of potential mass. I enjoy the creation of a spectacle but simultaneously enjoy the experience of working in secret, on forms that may never be seen. Enjoy the rich contrasts between work made in the studio and work made on site, aware of the vast differences. Private individual, endures the experience of making in sight of others rather than enjoys. I consider myself to be self-taught in most media, especially willow, having created my own approach and technique which is unique to shape, form and siting of every piece.
Process Kim: Exploration, research, experimentation, pushing the material and techniques. Possibly breaking conventional rules and expectations. I’m always aiming to push the material to a point of breaking. My work isn’t always about reaching a final outcome or achieving a final object; the journey can be far more interesting. Reading, drawing and making all happen in conjunction with one another.
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Laura: Feeling the form and finding the way. Drawing on site to plan. Drawing in sketchbooks to plan. Finding a way to feel at one with a site, whether it’s the comfort of sipping tea from a flask while designing, or watching where the birds sit. Reveling in the freedom that comes with being able to work a material with just my hands. Examining weight and solidity of a form, even when the material may be relatively light. Aiming for a sense of growth in the work - the work needs to carry an energy of some sort. The work needs to feel at one with a site or corresponding structure and this should also have a kind of stillness alongside contrasting feelings of movement.
Material Kim: I predominately work with clay but I don’t want to shoehorn clay into a project if its not suitable. With material being at the core of my practice there is also a real sense of respect and understanding around where materials come from and questioning how I use them. In some cases the material is returned back to site. Clay is so often used in ways that strive for perfection and in some Image: Gorm Ashurst
cases this is a marker of our own skill and knowledge. To relinquish control by pushing clay and breaking certain rules you find something new. Laura: I enjoy materials that I can use my hands to work with. I am best known for willow because I’ve been able to tie and knot with it, but enjoy real substance and weight in materials too. If other materials are explored they are worked in ways that define that material a little. I want to use materials in my own way.
Reading Here are a few keys texts often revisited during research. Kim:
Laura:
Kimberley Chandler Material Talk
The haptic and the tacit are two modes of engaging with making - of knowing making - that are intimately linked. As Bonnie Kemske eloquently recounts, we rely on the haptic, on our sense of touch, to attend to the tacit, to that specific dimension of materials that cannot be known outright, only learned. Michael Polanyi calls this combination of modes ‘tacit knowing’, and describes how, with time, makers unconsciously assimilate this tacit form of knowing, bringing it to bear on their encounters with things; it becomes second nature.
Kimberley Chandler is a London-based researcher, writer, and editor.
It is, paradoxically, their awareness of tacit knowing that brings this particular group of artists together. Having been selected for the Crafts Council’s 2013 Hothouse programme, designed to enable makers to develop their practice, it was their collective interest in pushing their materials that gave them a sense of kinship. Hothouse provided them with the impetus and space for enriching conversations - with their mentors and among each other - wherein the group’s shared concerns for experimentation, for process, and for a more expansive approach to making emerged. Three years on, and these interests have not waned. It was this that initiated the idea to exhibit together, to shape an exhibition ‘on their own terms’. The decision to invite their mentors to exhibit alongside them acknowledges their cooperative support. Kim Norton describes how they conceived of Haptic/Tacit to exhibit work that would not sit comfortably in a more traditional craft gallery. Each of the makers attests to their prioritising experimentation, rather than design - that is, with experimenting with new ideas, rather than profitmaking. This is not to suggest that they are unprofessional - far from it. Rather, that departing from the constraints of professional practice, ‘of responding to a brief, or a particular audience,’ even temporarily, means making valuable space for testing out ideas, for revising their practices, and for opening up dialogue. No one has ownership of material knowledge and Haptic/Tacit reflects this. ‘We all have the same interests; no one is in this for their own self gain,’ states Norton: ‘This exhibition is the outcome of collective will.’ The focus on tacit knowing manifests in distinct ways. Kim Norton takes an almost scientific approach to clay; her methods are meticulous and exacting. Here, she attends to the humble brick, and, working outwards from its modular form, reimagines it in nine renditions. It is variously crushed, spread out, remodelled, and remade. Norton’s Brick in 9 Parts refocuses attention on that most universal of forms, literally reducing it to dust and making it anew. This iterative approach to making bricks is a form of research in practice. Thomas Appleton is more poetic than methodical. Acutely aware that stone is used to memorialise the solemn and impermanent - a person’s life, or the memory of an event - and the privilege that affords, he sought a line, a phrase, or anecdote that could challenge its status. He found it in Jennie Livingston’s 1990 documentary film Paris Is Burning, which explores the drag culture of 80s New York. When carved into stone, Pepper Labeija’s mischievous line in the opening scene: ‘Do you want me to say who I am and all of that?’ epitomises
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our expectation of materials to perform, of stone to hide its stoniness in deference to the epitaph. Instead, Appleton’s carved inscription is insolent, animated, and knowing. This stone speaks its mind. Jane Cairns meticulously traces the effects of the past in her multi-panel wall installation, an inch-by-inch account of goings on in London’s King’s Cross. Cairns reconstructs the crumbling paint, plaster, and general wear and tear of a street wall in an area of north London that played a significant role in its industrial expansion, using materials as diverse as terracotta, plaster, coloured slip, and paper resist. Still Life (N1) is astonishingly faithful to the original. Much like a conservator, Cairns retains the integrity of this London wall through careful attention to detail. Citing Norman Bryson in Looking at the Overlooked (1990), that: ‘Still life is unimpressed by the categories of achievement, grandeur or the unique’, she finds beauty in the commonplace, in the anonymous and everyday, in the inevitable deterioration over time. Grant Aston builds composite structures of clay and wood that emerge from a fascination with the architectonic. He experiments with joining fired sections of clay together, freeing his work from the constraints of the kiln, and purposefully disrupting any learned patterns of making. Aston draws on the language of decoration and restoration, his métier, when working with ceramics, in a conscious attempt to merge his specialist knowledge of gilding and finishing with hand building. Aston’s drives are personal and exploratory. Laura Grain is the storyteller, revelling in the potential of materials ‘to exchange experiences’ - of handmade objects to tell stories. Her particular interest is in the lives of women who encounter hardship, and how working with materials enables them to verbalise their experiences, citing Elizabeth Parker’s embroidered sampler in the V&A Museum’s collections as a particularly moving example. Esther Leslie writes that: ‘Crafted objects, […] provide a model of authentic experience, the experience of a person imprinted on to the objects that he or she brings into being’, and it is this capacity to encode memories in the process of making that appeals to Grain. Craft tells tales and materials speak. Despite the diversity of the work in Haptic/Tacit, what is evident among this group of makers is a belief in collaboration: in the satisfaction of sharing ideas, criticism, certainties and uncertainties, of learning from, and leaning on, your peers. ‘It is about making sure you are always outward looking, that you stay fresh and informed,’ admits Norton. It certainly takes courage to put your ideas forward, to know who you are, and what you do. Haptic/Tacit is a worthy attempt to find out. Yet, the real challenge for these makers is how to communicate their tacit knowledge to their audience. In a recent issue of Crafts, artist Simone ten Hompel proposes that the trick is to ‘learn to undo [it],’ to ‘turn up the volume so it’s no longer tacit, it’s broadcasted.’ It remains to be seen what pitch this exhibition reaches.
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exhibitors notes
Laura Grain/Shelly Goldsmith Making and storytelling are at the core of Laura’s practice; creating unusual objects that inspire and engage the imagination and encourage both fictional and historical stories. The uncanny, the subtle sensation that things are not as they should be, is a recurring theme within Laura’s work; contrasting or unexpected materials are often used to create a sense of wonder. She frequently utilises personal and domestic items for their familiarity; this heightens the tension between the real and the unreal; concrete and illusion. www.lauragrain.com
Shelly Goldsmith engages with textiles within gallery and site-specific contexts, often responding to historical environments. Using methodologies and theories borrowed from forensic or psychiatry partnerships, she explores and presents latent experience and memory inherent in worn clothing, especially examining the fine veneer of cloth that stands between us and the world; often a veil to the interior storm. Listening carefully to the stories the reclaimed garments present enables narrative to develop and imagining around their ability to carry memory, to absorb and reflect experience. These garments are often presented as a metaphor for common human states and present opportunity for self-reflection and personal insight. www.shellygoldsmith.com
Image: Henry Ross
Thomas Appleton/ Giles Macdonald Thomas Appleton works with stone. He trained formally as a letter cutter and a stonemason; his work crosses between art, design and craft, to explore our connection to stone and to champion its relevance. The UK has a unique geology. We still use the phrase ‘set in stone’ to mark an irreversible statement of truth - carved inscriptions cannot be unmade or edited. Thomas’s work explores the contrasts between old and new forms of communicating and sharing identity, renegotiating the role of stone in British heritage and challenging the conflation of prestige with permanence. www.thosworks.com
Giles Macdonald is a letter carver working with slate, stone and other materials. Giles designs and makes inscriptions ranging from plaques and tablets to architectural lettering. More than just texts, inscriptions describe experience, and their appeal lies beyond the words used. We sense this when we’re attracted to inscriptions we can’t read and whose language we don’t know. A linear text reflects the horizon in front of us. Inscriptions become a way of exploring the wider world and an acknowledgement of being alive. www.gilesmacdonald.com
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Jane Cairns/ Annie Turner Jane Cairns works in response to her surroundings, the ordinary and everyday of urban life, where she finds an accidental poetry that is often overlooked. Her aim is to translate some of what she sees and to allow others to share the quiet beauty she finds in these humble things. Jane takes an experimental approach to ceramic processes and materials to create objects with surfaces that apparently carry the traces of time or reflect the colours and textures of neglect. www.janecairns.co.uk
Annie Turner’s ceramic art is closely linked with the river Deben and its surrounding environment where she grew up in Suffolk. Her sculptural ceramics are hand-built stoneware that appear rusted from having been fired once, twice and sometimes on more occasions, and their surfaces are thickened and coloured with oxides and slips. Turner’s sculptures are delicate yet possess a quality of strength that suggests movements of currents and the tides of the water, changing seasons and the passage of time.
Image: Michael Harvey
Grant Aston/ Bonnie Kemske Grant Aston’s work is informed by biology and architecture; the material we are made from and the societies we build around us. Methods of construction hold a powerful intrigue for him, slip oozing from the clay elements to emphasise the joints, repurposed furniture clamped and pegged into place. His energetic pieces have a paradoxical sense of intransigence and malleability, an assemblage of industrial shapes combined with those from the body. Work for this show is based on the metropolis of London, a city in a constant state of flux. Brick-fronted buildings from our industrial past sit side by side with modern creations. Our Identity as a society changes with the passage of time. www.grantaston.com
Bonnie Kemske creates ceramic forms that are complete only when they are held. Cast by the human body, they are finished in soft textures that entice our sense of touch. Bonnie aims to give those who interact with her artwork a positive and calming experience. One person said, ‘As soon as I fit it to my body and found a place where it was comfortable, it didn’t feel cold or hard anymore. It felt as if I was hugging an extension of myself.’ www.bonniekemske.com
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Kim Norton/ Laura Ellen Bacon Kim Norton is trained in ceramics. A large part of her practice involves working sitespecifically, exploring scale and making work that impacts the human senses and how we interact with spaces. Materiality is key to the way Kim approaches projects, with an interest in using materials from the locality in their raw state to draw attention to, or reimagine, something that can often be regarded as unimportant or ordinary. This can range from soils, clays, brick or pigments. www.kimnorton.co.uk
Laura Ellen Bacon’s large-scale installations are almost always built on site, allowing her to form work in a way that truly fits a site. The sculptures that she makes have a closeness with a host structure or the fabric of a building; their oozing energy spills from gutters, their ‘muscular’ forms nuzzle up to the glass and their gripping weave locks onto the strength of the walls. Whilst the scale and impact varies from striking to subtle (sometimes only visible upon a quizzical double take), Laura relishes the opportunity to let a building ‘feed’ the form, as if some part of the building is exhaling into the work. www.lauraellenbacon.com
Information
Exhibition dates 25 - 29 October 2016 Leyden Gallery London www.leydengallery.com 13 January - 4 March 2017 Old Fire Station Oxford www.oldfirestation.org.uk
Acknowledgements Kim, Laura, Jane, Thomas and Grant would like to thank Laura, Shelly, Annie, Giles and Bonnie for their participation in the exhibition and their ongoing generosity of time, knowledge and support, it is greatly appreciated. We would also like to thank the Crafts Council for introducing us to our mentors and creating a space in the Hothouse Programme for those relationships to start and grow; Kimberley Chandler for giving us new perspectives on our respective practices and drawing out what brings us together; Arts Council England for their generous support for this catalogue and to Paul Hughes at 273K for design and layout; Phil Bell for the website; and the teams at Leyden Gallery and Old Fire Station.
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