CONCLUSION

FUTURE LIFE STAGES OF THE CERAMIC ARTEFACT - LIFE AFTER INTENTION

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.

25 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

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 successful, 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.

27 Tibor Fisher, The Collector, Collector.(New York: Metropolitan Books, Henry holt and Company, Inc. 1997) 28 Sherry Turkle, Evocative Objects: Things We Think With. (Massachusetts, USA: MIT Press, 2011) p. 9.

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.

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?

29 Sherry Turkle, Evocative Objects: Things We Think With. (Massachusetts, USA: MIT Press, 2011) p. 9. 30 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.