MEMORY OF THE CERAMIC OBJECT - LIVED EXPERIENCE

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

8 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

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 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…

13 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.

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

15 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/

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…

16 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).