ELLA PORTER
A SPECULATIVE ACCOUNT OF THE CERAMIC ARTEFACT: A POETIC JOURNEY THROUGH MEMORY, TIME, PLACE AND MATERIAL.
MA Ceramics and Glass Word count = 7,282 Submission 2020
CONTENTS
2 - BLUEPRINT ALTERED IMAGES
3 - PREFACE
5 - TOOLS FOR READING
7 - INTRODUCTION LIFE CYCLE OF THE CERAMIC ARTEFACT
9 - MEMORY OF THE CERAMIC OBJECT - LIVED EXPERIENCE 15 - THE VIRTUAL CERAMIC OBJECT - FLAT AND FAST INTERACTION 22 - THE PHYSICAL CERAMIC OBJECT - SHARED SPACE AND TIME
27 - CONCLUSION LIFE AFTER INTENTION - FUTURE LIFE STAGES OF THE CERAMIC ARTEFACT
33 - BIBLIOGRAPHY
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BLUEPRINT ALTERED IMAGES Fig. 0 (Front cover image intentionally pixilated) Erkin Kunstschilder, Egg Cups, 2010, Oil Paint on Masonite 35 x 26.5cm. https:// erkinpainter.com/stillevens/ Fig. 1 Photograph taken by Ella Porter, Foreshore Fragments, 2019. Ceramic shards, currently located at the ceramics studio at the Royal College of Art. Fig. 2 Ella Porter, screen shot @ellaporterstudio, 2020. Fig. 3 Photographs taken by Ella Porter, London Mithraeum, 2019. Digital photograph. https://www.goppion.com/projects/mithraeum-bloomberg-space Fig. 4 screen shot taken 2020, V&A ceramics collection search: Ceramics blue and white fragments, 1500-1600. Ceramic shards, currently located in the Victoria and Albert museum collections archive. https://collections.vam.ac.uk Fig. 5 Photograph taken 2019 by Ella Porter, England Tower Egg Cup. Ceramic egg cup, currently located at my home. Fig. 6 Photograph taken by Ella Porter, Engraver’s Practice Plate, Copper plate engraving, Spode Museum Trust, Stoke-On-Trent, 2020 Fig. 7 Adam Buick, Deep Map of the Potteries, 2019. (one piece from a collection with this title), Displayed at 2019 British Ceramics Biannual. Fig. 8 Adam Buick, Detail of Moon Jar, from Deep Map of the Potteries, 2019 Displayed at 2019 British Ceramics Biannual.
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PREFACE
Originally, I planned to carry out the research for this dissertation using primary sources, for example object handling sessions at museums, such as the V&A, through which I hoped to gain material and historical knowledge. I planned to use these tactile accounts to look at the unique qualities of clay and ceramic objects, with specific attention to those that are collected either by institutions or by individuals. Drawing influence from my own experience of clay as a material, I also want to investigate Philip Rawson’s approach in his book ‘Ceramics’, in which he describes the ‘aim to supply a basis for aesthetic judgement and appreciation both of the work the potter makes himself, and of work from the great ceramic traditions of the past.’ He goes on to say that the book ‘deals with what can be read from pots, not with what can be read in books.’1 It is this idea of reading pots that really interests me. I am a maker and, although I occasionally write, my chosen mode of communication is through the physical outcomes of my craft with clay. Consequently, it comes naturally for me to read the material language of pots, the processes involved in making them, and the journeys they have been on throughout the years since their creation. However, due to the situation we currently find ourselves in, in isolation, detached from our usual resources and tools for practicing as writers and artists, I have decided to approach this piece of writing in a different way; using my memory of the ceramic object as a source, the internet archive of objects at the V&A and finally a small collection of objects, to which I do have physical access during lock down. I aim to explore these ceramic objects through the varying realms of memory, physical and virtual space. Memory is especially significant in the writing that follows, as I will be imagining the life of the object prior to its current place in the world. The text brings together my poetic accounts of these objects, that are in some cases written from the object’s point of view, which I describe as the “embodied object”. The embodied object’s voice is a somewhat romanticised and poetic account of the lifecycle of the ceramic object. The object’s voice is juxtaposed with a second voice, my own, through which I talk about my discovery of the objects and their significance in a more analytical and factual way. 1
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Philip Rawson, Ceramics (London: Oxford University Press, 1971) p. 1.
I speak from my position as an artist and maker, whilst also considering the systems and practices around objects through the lenses of curation, archaeology, and conservation. It is worth acknowledging that through the process of selecting the artefacts that I will be looking at, I am in fact returning to ideas around collections and the act of collecting, categorizing and grouping. The process of choosing and grouping the artefacts can be seen as an act of curation in written form.
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TOOLS FOR READING
Embodied Object The Embodied Object describes the imagined voice of my chosen objects. These objects do not share the physical signifiers of human facial features for example; that would more readily be associated with an object that has an imagined voice. Instead my embodied object is a voice that takes on an essence of lived experience through wear and the material properties of ceramic. It is informed by my own knowledge of this material and it’s history, which is descriptively relayed to the reader within the poems and musings on the object.
Blue-print Altered Image Term used to describe the illustrations of this text. Selected illustrations are a photographic representation of physical and digital imagery/artefacts/sources in blue monotone. They act as a sort of diagram to the objects described in the writing, allowing the viewer to see the image with an impression of the source, without fully relying on it for all information and therefore giving the opportunity for the writing to fill in the gaps in understanding.
Digital Fragment Digital fragments – an idea used to describe the mathematical order of a grid that we as humans impose on things, in this case specifically digital - pixilated imagery, which is built up of a grid of coloured squares, experienced through light. Each small section a piece of information building up a larger whole. I invite you to consider that this is a digital fragment. Furthermore, when considering the digital fragment there is also the material left behind from outdated digital objects such floppy disc or CD. However, within the context of this piece of writing I am specifically interested in the idea of the digital image of the ceramic object as a digital fragment.
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Artefact Souvenir I use this to describe the found material culture of a certain site. The location where an object is found is relevant to the person who finds it, it brings them back to an attached time and place, where the object was found – triggering memory and sensory engagement. This type of object cannot be bought in a shop and may have no monetary value. Throughout this text I refer to ceramic examples of the artefact as souvenir or ‘Artefact Souvenir’. Ideas surrounding the souvenir are informed by Susan Stewart’s text On Longing; ‘The souvenir may be seen as emblematic of the nostalgia that all narrative reveals – the longing for its place of origin.’2
Flat Interaction This is the exploration and search of and for information without physical engagement with objects. Limited only to computer or phone key-pad, screen and touch screen. The term Flat Interaction could be seen as similar to or drawing parallels with the way we experience digital interaction, however it specifically refers to the lack of real material objects.
Susan Stewart, On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection. (Baltimore, USA: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984.) P. Preface Xii 2
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INTRODUCTION
The ceramic artefact lends itself well to taking on a voice and becoming an embodied object. An initial point to note is that the language used to describe ceramics is comparative to that used to describe the human body as ceramic objects may have a belly, foot, neck and lip, and even the mass of clay used to create the forms is described as the clay body.3
‘it is no accident that we, as well as other peoples, have always used anthropomorphic terms to designate these different parts of the pot, which is seen to be, in some sense, a symbolic analogue of the human body. There is thus a powerful element of somatic suggestion in the proportions and relations between the parts of pots, which can only be felt, not really
described…Only rarely do pots have heads. But they all have ‘lips’.’4
Considering the relationship of ceramic form and human body it is not so far a leap to be imagining the voice of the ceramic artefact. Of course inanimate objects cannot literally think for themselves but the qualities these objects possess not just through man made form but through the traces of time that they have captured and preserved, mean they speak of the past.5 Like no other material, clay’s fired state acts as a time capsule, capturing the moments of touch that produced its form, a direct connection between its viewer and its maker. The human body carries its own genetic clues and in a similar way such artefacts are experienced complete with inherent marking. Ceramic artefacts can survive for thousands of years bearing the evidence of their creation. No other medium can provide this connection to the past in a more tangible way. Life-Cycle of The Ceramic Artefact I invite you to consider that there are six possible life stages for a ceramic object. The first being its material body - clay - coming from the earth, this raw material pre-exists the object and is fundamentally the main unchanged element that creates what will be the ceramic artefact. The second is the processes of creation of the
Philip Rawson, Ceramics (London: Oxford University Press, 1971) Body images p. 100. Ibid. p. 100. 5 Leonie Hannan and Sarah Longair, History through material culture. (Manchester: Manchester University press, 2017) 3
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object; other raw materials that are added to the clay making it workable and stable in firing, the way it is melded and formed into shape, the surface treatment of the form it becomes. The third stage is the firing process; bisque firings and earthenware or stoneware glaze firings that it will go through - fixing it in time, this is when the object shifts from clay to ceramic.6 The fourth stage is its acquisition; where it ends up, who owns it, buys it, uses it, etc. The fifth is the moment at which it is lost or broken and discarded, detached from its intended place. Finally, the sixth stage is that of re-discovery, when the object is found, re-homed, re-acquired, collected and possibly displayed. It is during this sixth stage in the cycle that I am making contact, in some form, with my chosen artefacts. However, when faced with the problem of not having physical access to all of the objects I am studying, I must rely on the visual and written documentation that accompanies them. This brings up many problems when hoping to read the object in a sensory engaged way, more and more I find myself relying on previous experience of handling similar objects. Delicate, light, smooth, almost shell-like porcelain forms of containment. Their materiality containing their past, whilst their form stays open to holding the future. Until broken a pot has this possibility of containing another thing,7 when broken it shifts…fragments take on the role of evidence, clues to a past life.
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Philip Rawson, Ceramics (London: Oxford University Press, 1971) Part II techniques. P. 23. Alison Britton, Seeing Things: Collected writing on Art, Craft and Design. (London: Occasional Papers, 2013.) p. 234.
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MEMORY OF THE CERAMIC OBJECT – LIVED EXPERIENCE
Fig. 1 Photograph taken by Ella Porter, Foreshore Fragments, 2019.
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I ponder that memory itself shifts and becomes, like ceramic, fragmented over time, with gaps or lapse of clarity. The missing pieces of memories may be filled in with assumptions of what we thought happened or of what we thought we saw.8 Similarly the shards of pots found by archaeologists are patched back together and filled in; conservators piece shards back together to create objects that resemble the pots they have studied before, in a way that logically makes sense, but to an extent these will not be completely true to the individual original object from which the shard came. In reconstructing artefacts…
‘As everyone well knows, the genuine part is left just as it was found while the reconstructed parts are made of quite different materials, partly to make the reconstruction work stand out.’9
In contemporary conservation practice it is intentional to avoid any permanent alteration of the artefact and there is a preference for minimal intervention where possible. Reconstructed areas of pots are made so that at a later stage the interventions can be reversed, potentially leaving open the opportunity to alter reconstructions if more evidence is found.10 I try to recall the ceramic fragments I found several months ago on the Battersea foreshore. The fragments I collected of previously whole objects act in this context as souvenirs of the time and place where they were acquired. They bring my thoughts back to the moments I discovered them, and in this lies their value. They are not just fragments, a broken part of something more valuable, but the key to a moment that cannot be distilled or preserved.11 I wrote a poem or two at the time, when I sat looking at and holding these small ceramic shards. I Imagined the life of each tiny piece, I wrote my account of finding the fragments and the object’s account of where they might end up in the future if they were deemed important enough to become part of recorded history. This act of interacting with the ceramic object is a practice that Igor S. Utochkin, Independent features of real objects in long term memory, PDF research paper, (15 Aug 2019) https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31414858/ (accessed 01 April 2020). 9 Bruno Munari, ‘Theoretical reconstructions of imaginary objects.’ in The Object – Documents of Contemporary Art, ed. by Antony Hudek (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2014) P. 106. 10 https://www.fieldmuseum.org/science/research/area/conserving-our-collections/treatment/restoring-pottery (accessed 21 November 2019). 11 Susan Stewart, On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection. (Baltimore, USA: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984.) P. Preface Xii 8
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has become important to me as a maker, feeling the shape of the form and tracing over the surface of an object as a tool to figuring out how it has been made; what clay, temperature and techniques might have been used. Combined with my own learnt ceramic knowledge, it is as if these treasured objects gain a voice through this type of tactile interaction, and in turn my role becomes one of the archaeologist as well as the artist and craftsperson. It can tell me where it might have been, why it might have been broken, who made it, perhaps even, who used it. My curiosity about the ceramic object and a sense of intimacy that I gain from handling ceramics led me to write about a selection of ceramic objects, from their point of view.12
Discovering Fragments Washed up on the muddy banks of the river… Cool, wet, smooth, hard. Sitting like gems amongst the mulch, dirt and debris of organic matter, sodden wood and green brown algae, weeds, flecks of bright plastic litter and dull, dark stones Washed up, in… and out…with the tide and tides over many years of rhythmic dwelling, In…and out…. In….and out…. In…and out… In….and out…. In…and out… beneath this water. These pieces have fallen or been thrown, surviving now as discarded clues of past existence, dislocated from function and detached from the owner they were once imported for. In…and out… Carried by the same waterways into the city of objects and man-made material culture. The vessels carrying vessels came from far and wide silk roads and edible seas, In... out… in… 12
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Tibor Fisher, The Collector, Collector. (New York: Metropolitan Books, Henry holt and Company, Inc. 1997)
My interaction with these objects, that I do not live with, is on pause because of the circumstances of confinement and isolation during the Covid-19 pandemic. Without access to my studio, the shards are inactive again, tucked away for safe keeping. They sit in a box; wrapped carefully in tissue paper, in the drawer of my work bench, I can only retrace my memory of them. I paired them with some dried seaweed when I took them back to the studio. Forming a group of objects added a sense of imagined, poetic context to the ceramic pieces. I have given them more care than they have received for a long time. There is an excitement and intrigue in being the first person to pick something up after it has sat untouched and overlooked, perhaps for tens or even hundreds of years. The sense of discovery and nostalgia of a time before your own existence, as well as the realisation that the ceramic object will survive long after you are gone. This is the Artefact Souvenir. A new kind of value is attached to the objects, through the act of collecting, choosing and saving them, they become elevated, removed from the ordinariness of the utilitarian objects from which they derived. They have become worthy of such treatment through selection, at least for my own personal collection. If these objects, or similar objects of their kind, made it into an official collection, such as The Museum of London or The V&A, it is unlikely that they would be put out on display due to their fragment form; they are parts of something that was once whole and there is a tendency to give more attention or value to those things that survive in their original state, complete and perfect.13 Still, there is some charm and intrigue in the imperfect. In some ways the imperfect has more to say for itself, there is more attached to it, through the lived experience of tarnish and wear.
‘There is a long record of the shard, enduring fragment of the midden and the rubbish tip, informing art history and anthropology, and social fragments may say more than wholes…’14
My minds-eye thumbs over the surface of the piece again and it whispers to me…
Penny Crook ‘Approaching the archaeology of value: a view from the modern world’, Taylor & Francis online, 53 (27th of June 2019) P. 9-10 https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00794236.2019.1601381 (accessed 9th July 2020) 14 Alison Britton, ‘Old Stuff - New Life – Still Life: The lure of Junk’, Seeing Things: Collected writing on Art, Craft and Design, ed. Antony Hudek (London: Occasional Papers, 2013.) P. 229. 13
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Phase 5 – Fragment’s View Trade brought me here, Trade me for a plastic cap, is that what we do with our treasured material these days? What are your findings, will I be kept or tossed back to the banks; fracturing breaking, dispersed once more, becoming two or three versions of myself. Two, Three, Four, Five, Six, shards…s..h..a..r..d..s… Skin tarnished by wear and age a segment of an image that once covered the whole of me, cut off. What is left but a clue to my past life on dry land with shelter, Whole…within my own vessel home, now I live amongst many who have had similar displacement; brick, pipe and porcelain, tile, I stand out with my blue and white pattern, far from the east. Am I?
It is not difficult to imagine this, like many objects, collected and given a new context in history. A small part of the mesh and framework of our understanding of the past, an example of many perhaps, but each unique, adding new insight. I am convinced that the first of the two blue and white fragments is hand painted and perhaps part of a tile. The underside of the object is not glazed and is thicker than a piece of crockery would be, to me this suggests a rarer find. The fluid handbrushed lines are similar to that of delft-wear tiles that I have seen.15 It could also be Chinese, although it doesn’t appear to be porcelain. Similar imagery is found on
Unkown, Tile – David returning with Goliath’s head, Ceramic, V&A Online Collections, 1700-1720, http://collections.vam.ac.uk/item/O20586/david-returning-with-goliaths-head-tile-unknown/ 15
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shards of blue and white transfer printed bone china from Stoke-On-Trent. These printed versions are one of the more common examples to find on foreshore and are often influenced by earlier hand painted versions from Asia.16 The hand painted surface depicts part of an image with a horse on a bridge, I think. I look at a photograph that I took of the fragment, there is a wall like structure depicted below the horse, with vague marks suggesting shrubbery, plant life and land or maybe water in the foreground in front of the wall, it is not completely clear. I can only imagine the rest of the image that would have originally surrounded this small section when it was in its complete form. Cobalt blue brushed lines, plants made up of minute repeated short gestures.
‘we see vases reconstructed from tiny scraps of pottery…, and if there is a design on these an effort is made to reconstruct this as well as the pot itself.’17
My experience and knowledge gathered, tells me that the image on the fragment is probably part of an idealised landscape, perhaps depicting some element of real life, not so far from the real lives of those who may have held or used it whole, but still aspirational or even partly imaginary. The miniature world to which the ceramic object gives us access, is often a dream scape of ideological living, a realm in which things are better than reality. Examples of such idealised landscape may be seen in the images printed onto ceramic of the early eighteen hundreds.18 The surface of the object is tarnished and cracked, a crazing in the glaze of wear rather than intention, soft egg shell, almost like one you might try and imitate as a maker, silky and smooth from wear but not luscious like gloss, thin and thinner than before it was worn, barely there. Underneath the glaze lies the blue cobalt marks produced by brush, held by a hand, the hand of the maker. I can imagine the continuation and flick of the brush strokes onto the rest of the form, ceramic painting has no frame, so the mind can wander…
Maxine Berg, The Asian Century: The Making of the Eighteenth-Century Consumer Revolution. ‘Cultures of Porcelain between China and Europe’ , PDF article, http://www.lse.ac.uk/Economic-History/Assets/Documents/Research/ GEHN/GEHNConferences/conf10/Conf10-Berg.pdf (accessed 10 July 2020) 17 Bruno Munari, ‘Found Objects, Lost Objects, Non - Objects - Theoretical Reconstructions of Imaginary Objects,’ in The Object – Documents of Contemporary Art, ed. Antony Hudek (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2014) P. 106. 18 Spode Museum Trust, ‘Brief history of Spode’, http://www.spodemuseumtrust.org/history-of-spode.html (accessed 01 April 2020). 16
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THE VIRTUAL CERAMIC OBJECT – FLAT AND FAST INTERACTION
Fig. 2 Ella Porter, screen shot @ellaporterstudio , Instagram, 2020
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A visit I had a few months ago to the London Mithraeum got me thinking about the ways that we, in contemporary society, often experience objects through screens. The Mithraeum is a Bloomberg project, where huge investment allows for their collection of artefacts, found at the site, to be impeccably well presented. They are displayed in a glass fronted case; each individual object sits at the end of a metal armature holding it slightly out from the wall, as if floating, for viewers to observe. The experience of viewing these objects is accompanied by a touch screen i-pad with a sort of blue-print grid display of the wall and the ability for viewers to swipe left, right and zoom in and out, of each image of each object, virtually delving into its history. Most objects displayed would have had a utilitarian everyday purpose, the grinding wear of a pestle and mortar’s use is evident by the hole in its base worn thin by the repetitive actions of daily life.
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Fragment as the Museum Artefact I sit out on a limb for you, my viewer – I collect you daily, I prefer some… to others… Long gone are the days of touch, I used to be held continuously by hands or mud, by the rest of my body… a continuation of my form, by the clay I came from, the ground, the earth - clay. I sit silent. Perched upon this stand, minimal contact is their preference and context is key to understanding me… But I lack the information to tell you everything, perhaps just enough to intrigue, to keep you searching and collecting. I’ve been here long before you, from the earth, My maker was a preservationist too, see the thumb mark on my side. Thousands of years have passed, and I feel it still, Pressing in, Nestling in, Pressed in, I have been frozen in time, touch is the only warmth, since the flames forged me.
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Fig. 3 Photographs taken by Ella Porter, London Mithraeum, 2019.
The digital image is seen remotely from the object in pixels and light. It seems that the preference of most viewers at the London Mithraeum that day was to flick furiously through the i-pad rather than to look more closely at the actual physical objects. That said, the objects on display are still detached from our immediate space, so without the possibility of touching their surface, tactile engagement with the object is substituted for sliding our fingertips over flat, smooth screens, which inherently also offers a quick view of changing imagery easily distracting us from the real thing. This kind of flat interaction relies purely on what we can see but to read objects properly I propose that touch is required.
‘the sense of touch is vitally important in the appreciation of any plastic art, sculpture no less than pottery. But we Westerners are not allowed
to handle things in our museums; we have been brought up in a culture dominated overwhelmingly by graphic images addressed solely to the eye. Nowadays, as well, we live out our lives besieged by arts based upon various kinds of photographs…and make no appeal at all to any other senses.’19 Back in the 1970s Philip Rawson expressed similar ideas to my own around tactile engagement and the need for touch. However in the seventies the internet didn’t
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Philip Rawson, ‘Tactile Values’ in Ceramics (London: Oxford University Press, 1971) P. 19
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exist in the way we know and understand it now and since the eighties, advancements in computer technology have been vast.20 We rely less and less on tactile engagement for information and this is especially true of our experience during lockdown, without face to face interaction we rely on what can be provided by the internet to take ourselves out of our immediate living space. As makers, artists and especially as viewers the way we experience works of art, amongst other material culture, is also fragmented. There are multi-faceted realms in which we come into contact with things, this is specifically true of our experience of objects through the internet, social media and websites. The image becomes as important, if not more important, than the physical work itself. The control of setting, lighting, editing and formatting allows us to influence other people’s perceptions of the physical object. There is to an extent a lack of choice made in viewing through digital means; our experiences may be diluted, homogenized and even predetermined by prior searches and algorithms, further removing us from an individualised unique experience. Instagram for example is widely used by the visual world to curate personal digital collections within its grid format of square images, shown in fig. 2. In addition, it is designed to fit a fast pace of living and viewing. Scrolling and flicking through digital imagery, one image after another, does not require a mindful interaction where time and care is a necessary part of the process of engagement. Through repeated digital interaction our attention itself can become thinner, fragmented and split between multiple options, crammed into moments that might have been for quiet contemplation, the digital world can fill the empty spaces that we avoid. If we consider the fragment in a wider context, not just to describe a ceramic shard, but to be anything that is a small section of a larger whole; something that gives us a snippet of information and subsequently alludes to the whole, then, in these terms we can consider that the whole of the digital image, or even printed image, is already a fragment, as it is far removed from the original material object, lacking most qualities through which we may draw sensory perceptions of the artefact. We could further explain the pixilated image to be a kind of visual, digital fragment; each tiny, seemingly insignificant coloured square adding to a map-like grid of the whole image. Grids are used to order, control, analyse and break down. They are also used within the context of an online catalogue or archive, to set out the format for a level playing field,
Internet Society, ‘Brief history of the internet’ https://www.internetsociety.org/internet/history-internet/brief-history-internet/ (accessed 6 July 2020). 20
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a viewing system, which is supposedly neutral and without bias. The grid is a useful tool to the museum curator. The lack of hierarchy in a grid and satisfying employment of order, allow for the minimal alteration approach, similar to that of the conservator; nothing is hidden. Displayed for viewers of the objects to pick out their favourites from the vast collection. Considering ideas of the grid, digital fragment and flat interaction I move on to explore the realm of the virtual artefact through the Victoria and Albert website collections. The V&A catalogue comprises images of objects, depicted in isolation on a neutral background, divorced of context; other than that, official documented and approved by the archaeologist, curator, museum archive and historians whose professional contact with it placed it for others to view. It is not easy to settle on one object of focus. The process of scrolling through pages on my computer does not provide the shared intimacy that is experienced in the china galleries at the top of the Victoria and Albert Museum building, where an object can draw you in like a magnet. Scrolling through the V&A catalogue it seems that it is the complete objects to which most attention is given. So initially, I narrow my search looking specifically for ceramic blue and white fragments, curious to see how objects similar to those that I found on the foreshore are catalogued. It seems little is known about the artefacts that come up on the website, or is it, perhaps because they are considered to be less valuable than the complete objects or simply because they lack information in their fragmented form?
Fig. 4 screen shot, V&A ceramics collection search: Ceramics blue and white fragments, 2020
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I decide not to choose one individual artefact from the online collection but rather to observe the use of digital search engines as a form of collection. Fragments of fragments. I consider what digital materiality might be… through advancement in digital communication certain digital modes of carrying information have become outdated and discarded, for example the Floppy Disc, CD Rom and even USB. This material ephemera left behind that is now useless in function but is still a symbol of date time and place a physical digital fragment that now occupies our shared environment but ceases to serve an active function. Similarly to the broken shards of utilitarian ceramic objects this digital material is evidence of past practice. However, ceramic objects in their complete form are still widely used in the same ways as they have been for thousands of years, whereas digital objects become redundant much quicker, replaced by upgrades of smaller, faster, more effective versions multiple times a year. In hundreds or even thousands of years to come we may come across the physical detritus of the prior digital age, such as the plastic remains of a disc or USB and have little understanding of what they were for or how they might be relevant. However, the ceramic object has already survived the test of time, so to speak; the oldest piece of ceramic is over 20,000 years old, furthermore, the vessels used for storing and eating food hundreds of years ago comparatively have changed very little to new versions produced today.
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THE PHYSICAL CERAMIC OBJECT - SHARED SPACE AND TIME
Fig. 5 Photograph taken by Ella Porter, England Tower Egg Cup, 2019
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In current times, within the Covid-19 pandemic, we spend more time than usual attempting to communicate and connect via virtual means, specifically from home. Furthermore, the things we choose to fill our home environment with now, surround us much more of the time than they did prior to the pandemic. Most utilitarian objects of mundane everyday rituals are held much more, perhaps two or even three times a day when making food and having every meal at home. It is possible that we have taken the time to experiment and to use things in a different way, perhaps to seek out and use the proper vessel or implement for the task or meal at hand. To have and use a very specific type of ceramic object was a speciality of the Victorian era, some such as tea cups with moustache guards or fan shaped dishes used to arrange and serve asparagus have been lost in contemporary times, the emphasis is less on doing the ‘proper’ thing and more on convenience. However, a few of these more niche items can still be found in most kitchens, the egg cup being one example. Fig. 5 shows A new copy of an old egg cup, bought in Stoke-on-Trent. Little about it has changed from earlier examples21 and despite being a mass produced item it still relates to the hand of its maker. The cup has an unruly scrawl on its underside, perhaps the mark of its maker, more human and free than the blue transfer print design on its surface, the clay is formed exactly as intended however, small and perfectly cast from a mould, it is one of many, the faults of black scrawl and smudged blue are the thing that make this object an individual, and the fact that it has been selected and brought home by me, a souvenir of my visit to the place where it was produced. This type of small printed object from Spode is not unique, rather it comes from the age of mechanical reproduction,22 the process is made for mass consumption, it serves as a replica of its Chinese hand painted predecessor. Nevertheless, it still tells a story of place and time. The egg cup, in itself, as an object, provides some sort of stability in the current isolated and uncertain times. Often the first meal of the day, the egg itself provides structure, it is a marker of time. However, it was hard to find eggs at the start of lock down, so the eggcup sat on the shelf, much like those museum objects dislocated or detached from its prior use, a reminder of the strange situation we find ourselves in. In this exploration of past lives and present reality, it is a poignant reminder that we
V&A, ‘Search the Collections: Ceramics egg cup’, https://collections.vam.ac.uk/search/?offset=15&limit=15&narrow=1&extrasearch=&q=Ceramics+egg+cup&commit=Search&quality=0&objectnamesearch=&placesearch=&after=&before=&namesearch=&materialsearch=&mnsearch=&locationsearch= (accessed 10 July 2020) 22 Walter Benjamin, The work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction. (London: Penguin Group, 1936) 21
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cannot predict exactly the journey we will take through life, what will be essential to us and what will fall into disuse. Who could have guessed, a few weeks ago, that I would not have the ability to use this egg cup? The scene upon the side of the egg cup is a landscape of partial reality and partial imagination; it speaks of space and freedom outside the confines of small London flats. At least we have the garden. Sitting proud upon its stem. Ready and waiting – quietly anticipating the placement of one hot curved brown shell to fall into it’s rim, the perfect fit of an egg completing its form when in use but empty is its status for the moment. To Hold To hold, is my purpose, I sit proud, heightened ever so slightly by stem and foot, Waiting… for the mornings, rare occasions of use, the weeks end, the break in your fast, Hold me, I am lost amongst the crowd of crockery; bowls, mugs, plates and platters I share the shelf with, Sometimes, whilst waiting, I am placed inside the concave void of my neighbour, an attempt to save space…create space, Bring me out, Place me upon the flat plane of your plate, create space for me, space for use, space for us, I can hold.
This souvenir of place and time has taken on new meaning, its humble status as an everyday, utilitarian object brings it closer to my current mode of being; at home, inside, repeating the same
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daily rituals of simplified and restricted living. The egg cup has also acquired some neighbours during this time of isolation; small shards of ceramic, found discarded amongst weeds and dirt in the garden. Used once again for containment, I place each shard I find in the egg cup; a small section of a tea cup handle, a milky bone china curved shard, a small section of the foot-ring from the base of a small dish. Other fragments have the minute surface detail of copper plate transfer print in cobalt blue, which sets them aside from the rest. There is one piece in particular that has a diamond grid pattern on it, part of the rim of an object, which I have managed to match to a pattern from the Spode factory in Stoke.
Fig. 6 Photograph taken by Ella Porter, Engraver’s Practice Plate, Spode Museum Trust, Stoke-on-Trent, 2020
Shortly before lockdown, I made a trip to Stoke-on-Trent to visit the Spode factory and learn about copper plate transfer printing. I met Paul Holdway, a trustee of Spode ,who was previously master engraver there during the 1980s and 90s, just prior to the collapse of the ceramic industry in the UK and Spode’s closure in 2009. He showed me the archives of engraved copper plates and demonstrated the printing process to me; explaining that during the trial period of becoming an engraver’s apprentice you would have had to repeat practice patterns and plates over and over again before being trusted with a plate that would be used to create a complete pattern for production. The old practice plates have this same fragmented quality of ceramic shards, small sections of designs floating around, detached from one another. Like the found shards, elements of the patterns shown in fig. 6 can be found embedded within finished designs on ceramic objects displayed at Spode.
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Fragments, like pattern, have the ability to let the mind wander. The snippets of image on the shards surface often have a logical continuation; the curve of a shard might imply which part of an object it belonged to, while the pattern printed upon it may be designed specifically to fit a particular curve, for example a border pattern created to fit the rim of a dish, like the small fragment I found during lockdown in the garden, that now sits in the egg cup. The intricacy of the detail in my found fragments is typical of this lost transfer printing process. Popular during the eighteen-hundreds and dating back to the sixteenth century this method was used to mass produce both the patterns that decorated the surface of table wear as well as the marks on the underside of objects, used to promote and identify its origin.23 24 This method was largely used at the time and for a long while after, well before digital ceramic transfer equivalents were available. The decoration and more specifically marks on a piece of ceramic from this time are what allow us to accurately trace them, but it is also the minute detail that in this instance feels so important. If a printed item were to fracture and break, as many will and have, then the small fragments left behind are still relatively easy to trace back to a specific object, place and time due to their distinct detail, thus making this specific element of ceramic production extremely important in understanding the history behind these objects.
Friend, G.T. ‘Metal Engraving’, in Fifteen Craftsmen on Their Crafts, ed. John Farleigh (London: The Sylvan Press, 1945) P. 25-30 24 William Chaffers, Handbook of Marks and Monograms on Pottery and Porcelain, (London: Reeves and Turner 1906) 23
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Fig. 7 Adam Buick, Moon Jar, from Deep Map of the Potteries, 2019
FUTURE LIFE STAGES OF THE CERAMIC ARTEFACT - LIFE AFTER INTENTION
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Looking back to ideas around the life-cycle of the ceramic artefact we may even consider a seventh stage of the ceramic object’s life. A phase in which all previous events after acquisition are repeated, possibly multiple times, the shard fragmenting further and further, like shells on a beach breaking down and becoming sand. Ceramic will never regain the material properties of clay; its elastic memory, its ability to be flexible and moulded. Like shell becomes sand - the mass of the beach, pottery may be broken down to form rubble under our roads or discovered in even smaller fragmented parts dug up in our gardens, the pottery remains of Roman Londinium for example.25 ‘Ceramics sit apart from other media because it cannot be remade. Ceramic as a material is irreversible, we are stuck with it – it cannot go back to being clay.’26 As Alison Britton describes, ceramics ‘is not stuff for actual recycling.’ However, the ceramicist often comes up with solutions to prolong the seventh repeating phase of the ceramic lifecycle. It is common practice for discarded bisque-ware to be ground down by the potter and added back to a fresh clay body as grog - these pre-fired particles can be used to strengthen the clay, minimise the shrinkage between wet and dry states and allow for heat to pass through the walls of a form more easily. The use of grog is not always obvious but may be more apparent when used for visual purposes, in larger shards as inclusions in the clay body, such as the early work of Felicity Ayliff or Claudi Cassanovas. Some ceramicists have gone a step further creating almost entire works with discarded pottery fragments for example the works of Gillian Lowndes, Neil Brownsword and Robert Cooper. However, with regards to this seventh phase of the cycle and when pondering the future of the ceramic fragment I am specifically interested in one piece from the series: Deep Map of the Potteries, 2019, By Adam Buick. Fig. 7 shows a moon jar from this collection, which has shards of ceramic, found on site at the Stoke-onTrent potteries, embedded and fired back into the body of the pot. Through the process of re-firing the surface print of these fragments bleeds with the glaze into the surface of their new carrier form.
Guildhall Art gallery, ‘Visit London’s Roman Amphitheatre’ https://www.cityoflondon.gov.uk/things-to-do/attractions-museums-entertainment/guildhall-galleries/londons-roman-amphitheatre (accessed 15 July 2020) 26 Alison Britton, ‘Old Stuff - New Life – Still Life: The lure of Junk’, Seeing Things: Collected writing on Art, Craft and Design, ed. Antony Hudek (London: Occasional Papers, 2013.) P. 224 25
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Fig. 8 Adam Buick, Details of Moon Jar, raw and glazed, from Deep Map of the Potteries, 2019
Taking Adam Buick’s work as a speculative case study, we may find, if or when broken in the future, a fragment within a fragment – a section of embedded artefact within another artefact, this could happen again and again, creating a sort of historical object vortex one shard quoting the last and so on. In this case the complete, un-fractured, form of the pot becomes its own collector and collection.27 Drawing parallels with Tibor Fisher’s book The Collector, Collector; a fictional account of the life of a Ming vase. The book is written about the people who surround this special object through the hundreds of years of its life. A collected object that collects stories of its collectors. The object exists in the writing in still life from our human eye point of view but when the gaze is switched it becomes a silent onlooker, quietly observing life in a way we cannot; without influence and interference. Having considered the ceramic artefact through memory, online digital media and within real space, it is clear to me that the driving force behind my interest in these objects is, or has become, the act of collecting itself. Through formulating an enquiry into the fragment specific ceramic artefact, an obsession has formed.
‘in the psychoanalytic tradition, both persons and things are tellingly called “objects” and suggest that we deal with their loss in a similar way. For Freud, when we lose a beloved person or object, we begin a process that, if success- ful, ends in our finding them again, within us.’28
In finding objects there is a sense of connection, they appear to you, you discover and choose them, because there is no advertisement or monetary exchange, you really have to choose. You invest time in the object, trace over its surface and ponder its past. This investment of time attaches value to the chosen object, it starts to make sense through you, it becomes intrinsically attached to you, part of you. Personal collections are an extension of how we view and feel about ourselves, the immortal object is comforting to a mortal being. Perhaps this is one reason for attaching human attributes to ceramic pots.
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Tibor Fisher, The Collector, Collector.(New York: Metropolitan Books, Henry holt and Company, Inc. 1997) Sherry Turkle, Evocative Objects: Things We Think With. (Massachusetts, USA: MIT Press, 2011) p. 9.
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Made of the same clay My body will return to the earth, when internal thought has left my mind, breaking down…until I am unrecognisable, De-con-struc-ted, Sinking back into the land that held me in life, Clay comes from the land, So perhaps I will become some part of clay, Sinking further, minerals, mud and water, meshing, morphing and melding with the earth, trickling through…into the earth, dripping….. pa, pa, pa, pa, filling empty pockets and gaps, altered, shifting until we are the same, m, m, mu, wmu, mud....waiting to be exhumed from the ground, revived again through the hands of another maker I take form, object form, So others may hold me, us, and light may fall on our lip.
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Sherry Turkle describes in Evocative Objects; ‘The idea that we often feel at one with our objects’29 I feel certain that without the physical sensation of touch and temperature, or the subtle nuanced way that my eye picks up moving light upon a ceramic object’s glazed surface, or even a subtle odour that offers a true sense of materiality, without my full range of senses engaged my experience is impoverished and I could never feel so completely at one, with the images of objects on a screen. I reflect that lock down has impoverished my senses reduced my opportunity for engagement and limited my activity to create. Through a screen It is possible to stimulate memory, to recall sensations from previous relationships with objects and people, it has its value but it cannot replace physical engagement with either.
‘Like words in a sentence, it is the relationship between objects that make them mean something to the eye.’30
Similarly, it is the physical proximity of human body to ceramic object, which is formed by the human hand, that charges the interaction and relationship between person and ceramic or clay object. An object detached from its surroundings, without contrasting materials with which to compare its qualities to and without changing daylight to add a sense of shifting time, the object in the digital realm is frozen and devoid of life. The life of an object is reliant on its interaction with changing surroundings just as humans are reliant on interaction with other people and objects. This being said there are questions about the future of the ceramic object, their materiality and relationship to the body are qualities that exist in a very different realm to the digital world we increasingly engage with. I wonder what the fragments of the future will look like? Will we care about them and collect them? Perhaps we will collect digital fragments, keeping them somewhere safe to refer back to? Considering these questions and with the realisation that technological and digital advancement will likely continue to advance rapidly, I pose the final question… Are we collecting memories of the object or is it the ceramic object that holds collected memories of us?
Sherry Turkle, Evocative Objects: Things We Think With. (Massachusetts, USA: MIT Press, 2011) p. 9. Alison Britton, ‘Old Stuff - New Life – Still Life: The lure of Junk’, Seeing Things: Collected writing on Art, Craft and Design, ed. Antony Hudek (London: Occasional Papers, 2013.) P. 234. 29
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BIBLIOGRAPHY
BOOKS Benjamin, Walter, The work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction. (London: Penguin Group, 1936) Britton, Alison, Seeing Things: Collected writing on Art, Craft and Design. (London: Occasional Papers, 2013.) Chaffers, William, Handbook of Marks and Monograms on Pottery and Porcelain (London: Reeves and Turner 1906) Cummings, Neil and Lewandowska, Marysia, The Value of Things (Berlin: Birkhausser – publisher for architecture, 2000) Dudley, Sandra H. Museum Objects – Experiencing the Properties of Things (Oxon: Routledge, 2012) Farleigh, Friend, G.T. ‘Metal Engraving’, in Fifteen Craftsmen on Their Crafts, ed. John Farleigh (London: The Sylvan Press, 1945) P. 25-30 Fielding, Amanda, Gillian Lowndes(Denbigshire: Ruthin Craft Centre in association with York Museums Trust, 2013) Fisher, Tibor, The Collector, Collector. (New York: Metropolitan Books, Henry holt and Company, Inc. 1997) Friend, G.T. ‘Metal Engraving’, in Fifteen Craftsmen on Their Crafts, ed. John Farleigh (London: The Sylvan Press, 1945) Fusco, Maria, Give Up Art, (Los Angeles, USA: New Documents ND17, 2017) Hannan, Leonie and Sarah Longair, History through material culture. (Manchester: Manchester University press, 2017) Harrod, Tanya, Craft: Documents of contemporary Art (London: Whitechapel gallery & MIT Press, 2018)
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Hudek, Antony, The Object: Documents of contemporary Art (London: Whitechapel Gallery & MIT Press, 2014) Lange-Berndt, Petra, Materiality: Documents of Contemporary Art. (London: Whitechapel gallery & MIT Press, 2015) Livingstone, Andrew and Petrie, Kevin, eds, The Ceramics Reader (London: Bloomsbury publishing Plc. 2017) Rawson, Philip, Ceramics (London: Oxford University Press, 1971) Stewart, Susan, On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection. (London and Durham: Duke University Press, 1993) Tilley, Chris, and others, eds, Handbook of Material Culture(London: Sage Publications Ltd, 2006) Turkle, Sherry, Evocative Objects: Things We Think With. (Massachusetts, USA: MIT Press, 2011)
JOURNAL ARTICLES Herdman, Sue, ‘Made in Stoke’ Ceramic Review, 300 (Nov/Dec 2019): P. 44 -50
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ONLINE JOURNAL Paul M. Leonardi, ‘Digital Materiality? How Artifacts Without Matter, Matter’,First Monday, 15 (June 2010) https://journals.uic.edu/ojs/index.php/fm/article/ view/3036/2567 (accessed 15 july 2020) Ed. Heiner Schwarzberg and Valeska Becker, ‘Bodies of Clay – Prehistoric Humanised Pottery’, The prehistoric Society, (2017) https://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/rcauk/reader.action?docID=5185054&ppg=1&query=Bodies%20of%20Clay%3A%20On%20Prehistoric%20Humanised%20Pottery (accessed 1 February 2020) Penny Crook, ‘Approaching the archaeology of value: a view from the modern world’, Taylor & Francis online, 53 (27th of June 2019) https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/ful l/10.1080/00794236.2019.1601381 (accessed 9th July 2020) Mike Webber, ‘An Archaeologists project’, Ceramic Review 270. (Nov/Dec 2014) page 79 https://reader.exacteditions.com/issues/40337/spread/78# (accessed Feb 2020) Colin Martin, ‘Kettle’s Yard: a collector’s life and legacy’ Ceramic Review, (May/June 2018) Pg. 39-43 https://reader.exacteditions.com/issues/62733/spread/38# (accessed Feb 2020) Courtney A. Stewart, ‘Tracing the development of Ceramics along the Silk Road’, The MET 150, (May 2016) https://www.metmuseum.org/blogs/ruminations/2016/ceramics-along-the-silk-road (accessed Feb 2020) Milette Gaifman & Verity Platt, ‘From Grecian Urn to Embodied Object’ (2018) https://www.researchgate.net/publication/326596729_Introduction_From_Grecian_ Urn_to_Embodied_Object (accessed March/April 2020) Brian Dillon, ‘Fragments from a History of Ruin - Picking through the wreckage’, Cabinet, 20 (2006) http://www.cabinetmagazine.org/issues/20/dillon.php (accessed May 2020)
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Sappho, Translated by Julia Dubnoff, ‘Poems of Sappho’ (570 BC) https://www. uh.edu/~cldue/texts/sappho.html http://web.b.ebscohost.com/ehost/ebookviewer/ebook/ZTAwMHR3d19fMjA5NjE4X19BTg2?sid=d47e0685-13d3-414f-b8f4-cbbb51e6388c@sessionmgr103&vid=0&format=EB&rid=1 (accessed May 2020) Igor S. Utochkin, ‘Independent features of real objects in long term memory’, National Research University Higher School of Economics, (2019) DOI: 10.1037/ xge0000664, https://www.researchgate.net/publication/335193378_Independent_storage_of_different_features_of_real-world_objects_in_long-term_memory (accessed April 2020)
WEBSITES https://ineradicablestain.com/stain.html (accessed 25 June 2020) https://chateauinternational.co.uk (accessed 25 June 2020) https://www.vam.ac.uk (accessed Jan – July 2020) https://www.londonmithraeum.com (accessed Jan 2020)
ONLINE MEDIA Lara Maiklem, Mudlarking (Omnibus), BBC Radio 4 Extra, BOB Learning on Screen,18 Aug 2019, https://learningonscreen.ac.uk/ondemand/index.php/prog/143BC268?bcast=129932515 (Accessed 28 Apr 2020) Georgia Mann, Memory objects, Radio, BBC Radio 3. The Welcome Collection, 9 Oct 2017, https://wellcomecollection.org/series/WdJB3CcAAIE-RlQp (accessed April 2020) Dr Janina Ramirez, Museums in Quarantine, I Player - BBC 4, 30th April 2020, https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m000hqq9/museums-in-quarantine-series-1-4-british-museum (accessed 1 July 2020)
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Fig. 0 Erkin Kunstschilder, Egg Cups, 2010, Oil Paint on Masonite 35 x 26.5cm.
