CERAMIC
REVIEW
The Magazine of Ceramic Art and Craft Issue 244 July/August 2010 ÂŁ6.30 www.ceramicreview.com
Paul Scott Blue and white ware with a political edge
lowRI dAvIEs
jonAthAn kEEp
MEREtE RAsMussEn
Bone china inspired by Welsh culture
Miniature organic porcelain forms
Colourful twisting sculptures
Turn,
, t s i w T Flow
Amanda Fielding gets pleasantly involved in the sculptures of Merete Rasmussen. 1
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1 Yellow loop, stoneware, 2009, H28cm 2 Blue double twist, stoneware, 2009, H35cm 3 Red-brown form, stoneware, 2009, H30cm 4 Dark double curved form, stoneware, 2009, H30cm
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Dominating one corner of her compact space ‘which I have already more or less grown out of’ in Camberwell, South London, Merete Rasmussen’s kiln could have been made for her, its soft shade of blue recalling the glazes of her distinctive sculptures. The smart, front-loading kiln faces a large window whose ledge is piled with bleached organic forms interspersed with flowerpots of succulents, hairy cacti and plant cuttings from Israel. At first glance this chalky treasure might be taken for bones, rocks and shells washed up on exotic beaches but closer inspection and conversation with the artist reveals it to be Rasmussen’s three-dimensional sketchbook, each handbuilt, fired clay ‘sketch’ or maquette marking a crucial preliminary stage in an object’s development. ‘Without the model I can’t see the direction in which to coil the final form. I stick very closely to the sketch and make only minimal changes as I’m scaling up,’ she says, adding that she regularly re-uses the models, frequently in combination with each other. On a work in progress – a swirl of grey stoneware curves half-hidden by plastic sheeting – lumps, bumps and fingermarks are much in evidence. Such ‘imperfections’ will finally be eradicated, scraped away by a variety of tools such as surforms and serrated metal kidneys as she strives towards clean lines and flawless surfaces. No place here for the trace of the hand. Austere forms are complemented by matt glazes in single colours that closely fit each object like a supple skin. Favouring tones of grey and blue, Rasmussen has recently introduced a vivid yellow into her palette and continues her quest to find the perfect orange.
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IntrIgue The fact that many viewers are initially foxed by the non-ceramic appearance of Rasmussen’s sculptures she finds a constant source of enjoyment. What are they made of? Strips of paper? Stiffened felt? Their convoluted forms intrigue the eye too, luring it on mesmerising and at times baffling meanderings along continuous surfaces that twist and turn like frenzied Mobius strips. Apart from the wall pieces, her works are three-dimensional with no correct front or back and can assume a number of different resting positions. Pinned on her studio walls are colour printouts CERAMIC REVIEW 244 July/August 2010
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of models for mathematical equations, which, in spite of their obvious connection with her work, she has only recently started to exploit as springboards for ideas. Clay Born in Copenhagen, Rasmussen grew up in the town of Aengelholm in southern Sweden where her father worked as a general practitioner. Both her parents attended evening classes in ceramics and carried on with their hobbies at home, her mother focusing on functional wares, her father on sculpture. As a child, Rasmussen would dig up clay in the garden and make little animals. ‘Clay has always been there’, she says. When the time came to choose a career she opted for nursing, thinking that ‘I had to get a “proper” job and it would not be possible to make a living out of ceramics or drawing.’ At the age of fifteen, following in her mother’s footsteps, Rasmussen began her three-year training as a nurse, after which she took up a hospital position caring for the elderly. Unable to shake off her fascination with clay, she enrolled on a ceramics evening course and was soon in her element handbuilding figures. Encouraged by her sister, she made a clean break from nursing ‘to do what I really wanted to do’ and embarked on a foundation course at Oestra Grevie Folkhoegskola with ceramics as her main subject. Fascinated by the natural world and the local flocks of rooks and bird skeletons she collected on long walks, she made ‘big black birds with ugly beaks’ and large, partly enclosed seashells. ‘I liked the idea of people being able to put their hands inside the shell, feeling rather than seeing their way in,’ she recalls. Two years on Rasmussen returned to her native Denmark where she spent five ‘very intense’ years studying ceramics at Designskolen in the small town of Kolding (including four months as an exchange student at Glasgow School of Art). At Designskolen she gravitated towards coiling large sculptural bowls, frequently
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exploring the ways in which stripes become distorted on round, three-dimensional forms. Influenced by the iconic designs of fellow Danes Arne Jacobsen (1902-1971) and Verner Panton (1926-1998), she also produced playful, double cast functional wares in soft shapes and rainbow colours. During college vacations she made memorable visits to Europe, Greenland, China and Namibia, whose dramatically lit landscape of sculpted sand dunes she recalls as ‘the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen’. In the summer before her final year she gained a place at TERRA, the International Sculpture Symposium on the site of a former brick factory in Serbia, where she made a monumental four-walled structure
5 Grey twisted form, stoneware, 2009, H30cm 6 Merete Rasmussen working in her London studio 7 Grey loop, stoneware, 2009, H40cm 8 Pale blue wall piece, stoneware, 2008, H55cm 9 Red-brown loop, stoneware, 2008, H20cm 10 Dark double loop, stoneware, 2009, H30cm
exhibitions Summer Salon, Gallery Lilly Zeligman, Laren, The Netherlands, 16 June-1 August 2010; Puls Gallery, Brussels, Belgium, 11 September-9 October 2010 Stockists The Scottish Gallery, Edinburgh; CAA, London; Contemporary Ceramics, London; Mouvements Modernes, Paris Web www.mereterasmussen.com
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enclosing an inner space into which visitors could walk. Back at college and working towards her graduation project, Rasmussen explored themes of solidity, interconnecting elements and interior space, producing large-scale stoneware sculptures, often glazed in single bright colours. As soon as she graduated in 2005, she was invited to participate in a workshop for recent graduates from Sweden, Denmark, Norway and the UK at the International Ceramic Research Centre at Guldagergard, southern Denmark. london A year later she moved to London, at first working from
a studio in Iliffe Yard and then from her current space at Vanguard Court Studios, which she shares with Catrin Howell, Annie Turner, Robert Cooper, Alex Hagen and Sun Kim. Exhibiting opportunities soon came thick and fast and by the close of 2007 she had shown at the Hannah Peschar Sculpture Garden, Yorkshire Sculpture Park, Contemporary Ceramics, Ceramic Art London and the V&A Shop, as well as venues in Scandinavia, Germany and Austria, among others. That same year she received the boost of a Crafts Council Development Award, followed shortly afterwards by the accolades
of being acquired by the Crafts Council and National Museums of Scotland for their collections. Regretting the recent closure of certain commercial galleries in Denmark she enthuses over the wealth of exhibiting opportunities in the UK, singling out Ceramic Art London, Origin, Collect and Contemporary Applied Arts for special mention. Looking ahead, Rasmussen is eager to work on a much larger scale and explore more complex structures that twist in on themselves. Such ambitions are not without their challenges, which she confronts with steely determination. How will the curved surfaces hold themselves up on a larger scale? Can she gain access to larger kilns at nearby Camberwell College of Arts? Speculating on the future, Rasmussen admits that she would like to work on outdoor commissions, expanding on her earlier ideas of making interior spaces into which people can walk. For me, her sinuous shapes are highly conducive to engagement with the human body and I leave her studio with visions of her designs adapted and scaled up into seating that also functions as sculptural statements in the landscape, further animated by changing weather and light.
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The Wild and the Natural Andy Christian is inspired by the political context of Paul Scott’s blue and white ceramics. Paul Scott works in Cumbria in the north of England. For many people that county name recalls the lakes and fells and wild edged rural landscape. When Paul Scott, who was born in 1953, was beginning his exploration of ceramics the last coal mines were closing and the forgotten and scarcely visited towns, which skirt their way down to Bowness-on-Solway and the sea to the west of the Lake District, were in deep decline. The Windscale nuclear plant was the object of such scary stories and leaks that it eventually tried to rid itself of its discredited past by changing its name to the more emollient sounding Sellafield. To the north of the county is Carlisle, near the border with Scotland and where the Roman Wall skirts the city and snakes its way down to Bowness-on-Solway in the west and right across to Newcastle upon Tyne to the east. Here England is at its narrowest point and the fells mark the northernmost edge of the Pennines. This is a county of huge contrasts. The Lake District has become a tourist honeypot summoning up Wordsworth’s daffodils but conveniently ignoring the radical political views he held as a young man. The towns to the west and north-west of the Lakes have been marginalised and are inhabited by many who suffer severe rural poverty. The Lake District visitors are sheltered from the bleak realities of the county’s fringes. It is in this county that Paul Scott works at his own political stance in the ceramics he produces. His work unfolds slowly. There is something beguilingly disarming about the traditional blue and white ware with which he works; something that wrong-foots us. It reminds me of the story Wilfrid Roberts, an earlier Member of Parliament for Carlisle, told me. He was a radical Liberal but later
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1 Scott’s Cumbrian Blue(s) – Spode Works Closed, Shops Closed, inglaze decal and gold on bone china salvaged from abandoned Spode factory, 2009-10, Ø30cm 2 Scott’s Cumbrian Blue(s) – Spode Works
Closed, Casserole (detail), inglaze decal and gold lustre on Spode’s Italian porcelain casserole dish (marked ‘Made in Czech Republic’) salvaged from kiln area at abandoned Spode factory, 2009, L30cm
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changed to Labour. At an election meeting, after making public his change of allegiance, he noticed the front row had been taken by a robust line of his farmer friends. As they sat silently and grim faced with their arms folded he thought there was something odd. It was not until some way through his speech that he realised they were each wearing their coats inside out. As he realised this their deeply wounding blow was far worse than being heckled. Blue and White Paul Scott’s work lands similar punches. By
choosing to work with industrially produced blue and white ware he has elected to undermine the cosiness, the decorative conceit that these wares can represent. But the commentary he makes is necessarily more complex. The history and the origins of blue and white wares cannot be ignored, nor can the current state of its production. The overriding irony is that the West was so enamoured of the imported Chinese blue and white ware in the seventeenth century that Meissen began to make it in the early 1700s. By the middle of the century it was ‘copied’ in Delft and in Worcester.
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Today few British industrial potteries make blue and white ware and we are importing it from China once more. Taking the traditional comforting blue and white plate as his starting point Scott has manipulated it to give it his own political charge. These plates were already political in representing a complacent conservatism, a celebration of an imaginary rural idyll in portraying a cloistered vision of the English countryside. In the case of the Willow Pattern it was a story of Chinese mythology, the lives of two lovers, invented in the West two hundred years ago. Art and craft is inevitably political because it is made by those whose blinkered vision denies the harsher realities of this world. Amongst others Grayson Perry, like Scott, has chosen to bring this to our attention. Scott chooses his canvas carefully. The imagery of ruralism sits there on the blue and white plates and, just like the Lake District itself, it blanks out the low flying jets, the slag heaps, the threat of nuclear fallout and the dangers of foot and mouth disease. To this Scott either adds imagery or erases parts of it. These acute alterations and additions are the backbone of his work. More
3 Scott’s Cumbrian Blue(s) – Spode Works Closed, Tienshan/Xingye, inglaze decal collage and gold lustre on Chinese porcelain bowl from abandoned Spode factory, 2009, Ø20cm 4 Scott’s Cumbrian Blue(s) – Spode Works Closed, Kiln, inglaze decal on Spode’s Italian porcelain
casserole dish (marked ‘Made in Czech Republic’) salvaged from kiln area at abandoned Spode factory, 2009, L30cm 5 Scott’s Cumbrian Blue(s) – Willow (after Bernard Leach), screen-printed, handbuilt form, wood (salt) fired (at ICS Kecskemét Hungary) with gold lustre, 2008-10, H20cm
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recently he has used the fragments and part-printed plates rescued from the now closed Spode factory to mark its passing.
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the industrial devil Most of the pottery factories in Stoke-onTrent that Bernard Leach railed about in a letter to Leonard Elmhirst in the 1930s as being ‘the home of the industrial devil’ have now gone. And with them have disappeared all the skill, technology and craft that these ‘devils’ held. Leach’s letter was occasioned because Leonard and Dorothy Elmhirst sponsored his son David Leach to attend a Pottery Manager’s course at North Staffordshire Technical College to gain the technical and practical knowledge the craft movement so sorely lacked. In yet another irony the knowledge David Leach acquired at Stoke put the Leach Pottery in St Ives on a much more technically sound and efficient footing, probably preventing its closure and allowing Bernard Leach to carry on with his invective. Scott has little sympathy for the affected orientalism of the Leach tradition. Recently he has handmade and even wood-fired a series of free-standing trees including a ‘Bernard Leach Tree’. Some of these are placed by the plates like stage props, sentinels or sentries in his altered worlds. In the plates recalling the devastation and horror of foot and mouth he has simply removed the cows, leaving a white CERAMIC REVIEW 244 July/August 2010
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6 Scott’s Cumbrian Blue(s) – Vindsäter – Windmills, inglaze decal on Rörstrand Vindsäter plate (made c.1938), 2009, Ø21cm 7 Scott’s Cumbrian Blue(s) Foot and Mouth series – Spode’s Blue Room, Milk Maid No. 3, partially erased Spode plate, with inglaze decals, 2004, Ø25cm 8 Scott’s Cumbrian Blue(s) – Spode Works
Closed, inglaze decal and gold lustre on Spode’s Italian porcelain casserole dish (marked ‘Made in Czech Republic’) salvaged from kiln area at abandoned Spode factory, 2009, L30cm 9 Scott’s Cumbrian Blue(s) – Vindsäter – Jet, inglaze decal on Rörstrand Vindsäter plate (made c.1938), 2009, H16cm
exhibitions Cumbrian Blue(s), CAA, London, 22 July-22 August 2010; Fired Up: Ceramics and Meaning, Gallery Oldham, Lancashire, 17 July-14 November 2010; Taking Time: Craft and the Slow Movement, Millennium Court Arts Centre, Portadown, 4 August-25 September 2010
email cumbrianblues@mac.com Web www.cumbrianblues.com For an aural version of the story of the Willow Pattern visit www.vam.ac.uk/ collections/ceramics/audio/willow/
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shadow. Inserted factory chimneys loom over water meadows. Screaming jet fighters blast their way through scudding cotton wool clouds and modified cows with swollen udders graze for our gratification. Sentiment, for Scott, is the very least of his concerns. While studio ceramics, among other sorts of making, are lauded in the new galleries of the Victoria and Albert Museum, the skilled industrial workers of the Potteries have been laid off, three hundred years of expertise has seeped away. No plaudits for their workers, just the dole queue. truth telling Much of the power of Scott’s work lies in the accuracy
of his alterations. It is in his truth telling. The tendency of cobalt to bleed helps to invoke that filleted mysticism of nature’s idyll that he so effectively undermines. It stirs memories of the paintings of Corot and Claude. The romance of the Willow Pattern story, invented by an English manufacturer as a marketing device, has endured, and it is probably the most widely recognised ceramic decoration of all time. Not everyone knows the narrative on the plates but they know the
name of the pattern and, oddly, these are regarded as unquestionably and comfortingly English as a game of cricket or a cup of tea. In his own terms Scott has contributed by ‘confecting’; bringing together the vintage and the modern. He subverts successfully, contributing a line of enquiry and a political stand that has won him few friends either with craft potters or with fashion-smitten collectors. The ceramics he makes hold the power to make us uncomfortable in posing questions about our complacency over the loss of industrial skills and the economic and social consequences for those people who were engaged in production. The ideas of ‘wild and natural landscapes’ are challenged by Scott, who prefers to focus on our ill-considered interventions and our exploitations. In this post-modern context the question might be who is the radical? Is there radicalism still in studio potters expressing themselves through the hand-wrought or is that now a romantic dream world as we head for increasing nuclear madness and laying waste to the earth’s scarce resources? Paul Scott will surely have something to ‘confect’ about that.
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