Unfinished
Business
Philip Eglin Unfinished Business 3 August – 2 September 2017
16 Dundas Street, Edinburgh EH3 6HZ +44 (0) 131 558 1200 | mail@scottish-gallery.co.uk | www.scottish-gallery.co.uk Left: Philip Eglin in his studio, 2016
Philip Eglin Unfinished Business The Scottish Gallery celebrates 175 years of art in 2017 which also coincides with the 70th anniversary of the Edinburgh International Festival which still provides an important ‘platform for the flowering of the human spirit’ and celebration of the arts in general. We are therefore honoured to present the work of Philip Eglin who has created Unfinished Business specially for the Festival and his fifth solo exhibition with The Gallery. Eglin is now firmly established as one of the most brilliant artists working in the ceramic medium, content to defy an obvious pigeonhole, his work is at once historically familiar and transgressive. We are grateful for this exciting new body of work and also to Sara Roberts for her insightful essay on the artist and his work. The Scottish Gallery Philip Eglin sometimes goes to the considerable trouble of making a mould in order to use it only once. This is inherently contradictory: mould-making implies near-identical reproduction, but Philip’s interventions make each piece unique. It’s as much about what is pressed into the plaster mould, which leaves a specific mark. He can make things differently every time: part-pressed, part-hand built – sometimes taken out of the mould in a soft state and manipulated. There is an edge, a contradiction, in everything Philip does; a kind of binary tension which gives his work both appeal and intellectual heft. He understands so well the human body and its beauty and formal vulnerabilities, and is a superb draughtsman, yet oftentimes he rejects this ease of his own understanding in favour of naïve drawings by his own children or from primary school workshops. And yet again, his own drawing retains that same direct, 2
elemental description, without mannerism or styling. He borrows text too, which he incorporates into the work; with the same principle of separation from his own hand – from graffiti, from hoardings; from found texts submitted by friends. A friend’s young daughter writes titles for him. Nothing if not a pragmatist. The text and decoration has a formal function, useful on the ‘flatback’ figures he has been making since his student days at the Royal College of Art, to make the viewer move. This is particularly pertinent on the ‘bucket’ works which carry disconnected imagery and themes on one side and another, and on their interior and exterior faces. One has a figure from an early Delft tile, emulating its economy of blue line and stylised rendering of costume and profile. Each piece speaks in many tongues, the language of one era of drawing juxtaposed with the high decoration of another; bold pink
‘Each piece speaks in many tongues, the language of one era of drawing juxtaposed with the high decoration of another’ 3
chevrons borrowed from a Gucci dress in a 2016 Glen Luchford promotional video. He even renders the marks of ageing from original observation of antique works, painstakingly evoking the crazing and fractured edges of the Delft tile. He is a consummate technical potter: with a huge technical vocabulary, he switches, borrows, combines recognisable idioms, from hand-built figures to the simplest, over-scaled cylinders which allow the greatest surface area for the application of motif. He has mastered hand-building, press-moulding, sliptrailing and glazing techniques over several decades of consistent practice. But he rejects the easy facility of that expertise: he always throws grist in the mill, injects an element of awkwardness to retain the sharpness of the 4
practice. Happy to riff on connections and contradictions between techniques normally distinct, this is characteristic of his general approach to life and to work. Any Philip Eglin exhibition acts as a kind of retrospective, in that he revisits themes and concerns he has worked on over the years, rich with possibility: Popes, Priests and Prostitutes Pinups. He says, why shouldn’t I revisit a subject? But his work always reflects where he is right now, a man at this stage in his life: it’s about the self, referencing the family, recent news items like Operation Yewtree, and the scandals of exploitation within the Catholic Church. His grown-up sons feed him word of what is out there in the world, and he feeds the information back into his imagery. He is well-read and an accomplished
researcher, spending long hours drawing from the notable ceramic collections in Aberystwyth and the Glynn Vivian Art Gallery in Swansea. There are historical precedents for the things he is making: Victorian flat-back figurines; figures in Cranach paintings from the 15th century; late-18th century Ralph Wood figures (pressed ceramic, lead-glazed figures where the seams are exposed). A series of ‘artist and model’ works occupies a long tradition of the double portrait in this mode – back to Picasso and earlier masters. There are now of course modern sensibilities applied to these dual images: ones of equality; of balance of power; the clothed figure versus the nude figure; of the ‘male gaze’. Philip is sensible to these new pressures, of political correctness, of hierarchy, of the acceptability of the genre. He has works in significant collections all over the world. He is thus able to make really substantial works with a realistic expectation of placing them well. But he also makes very small works, and transfer work on plates, because it has an immediacy which allows him the satisfactions of fairly rapid results. He says it is akin to channel-hopping; learning through making, without huge commitment, a nimble process of idea-acquisition and experiment. Immediacy. Unfinished Business implies irresolution, but is really an acknowledgement of the ongoing narratives running through Philip’s work, in themes, in techniques, in places and pieces revisited and revived through sharp scrutiny.
In terms of subject-matter he has always been subversive, accommodating the historic and the highly topical. He works up modern abstracts; derives imagery from images of ebay finds spoiled by the vendor in order to prevent digital copying: such as veteran photographs reproduced with Sharpie legends scrawled across them, or dotted with overlaid arrows or jarring motifs; Victorian erotic photographs of women disporting themselves on chairs, with overlaid symbols covering saucy parts; or historical imagery overlaid with texts and patterns with the frisson of post-post-punk. And thus he makes them even edgier. Somehow, none of it jars historically; in coming back to classical themes, he always comes back to the now, the highly pertinent: themes which are enduring and ultimately timeless. Angry once – but calmer, if not mellower, now – he still feels the rawness, a lingering resentment at the Catholic Church’s own institutional whitewashing. In reworking the Madonna or the Christ-figure, say, there is a given narrative, and he can treat it with reverence or irreverence, sometimes a highly challenging combination of both. A lighter, brighter outlook – a celebration of the freedom and space of his new rural existence, perhaps – may have lent his work a new theatricality and enhanced desirability, but he has lost none of the immediacy or freshness of his contradictory edge. Sara Roberts June 2017 sararobertsblog.wordpress.com
Opposite: Drawings of Blanc de Chine figures in the Glynn Vivian Art Gallery by Philip Eglin, 2015 5
Unfired bucket (Unfinished Business) on plaster batt in studio
1 Unfinished Business H 44 x diameter 37 cms Earthenware - coloured slips under a lead transparent glaze 7
Notes on buckets for John Christian, 2008 8
1 Unfinished Business alternative view H 44 x diameter 37 cms Earthenware - coloured slips under a lead transparent glaze 9
2 Chevron 44 x 31 cms Earthenware - coloured slips under a lead transparent glaze 10
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3 No Unauthorised Vehicles H 44 x diameter 37 cms Earthenware - coloured slips under a lead transparent glaze 12
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4 Blue Splatter Tureen 56 x 44 x 30 cms Earthenware 14
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5 Twombly’s Jug 45 x 39 cms Earthenware 17
6 Blue Twombly 45 x 40 cms Earthenware 18
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7, 8 Oval Dishes Diameter 31 cms each Slip decorated lead glazed, red earthenware
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9 Longhorn, 2015 44 x 39 cms Slip decorated, lead glazed, red earthenware 22
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10, 11, 12 Oval Dishes Diameter 31 cms each Slip decorated, lead glazed, red earthenware 24
11 12
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13 Swirl Diameter 48 cms Slip-trailed, lead glazed, red earthenware 26
14 Loop de Loop, 2015 45 x 39 cms Slip-trailed, lead glazed, red earthenware 27
15 Madonna and Child Diameter 40 cms Slip-trailed, lead glazed, red earthenware
16 Madonna and Child Diameter 40 cms Slip-trailed, lead glazed, red earthenware 28
17 Five Jugs, 2013 Max. H 19 cms Stoneware 29
18 Collection of mugs Max. H 11 cms Hand-pressed, painted with white slip and oxide transfers applied over a lead glaze 30
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19 Life Drawing, 2008 58.5 x 46 cms Pencil on paper 32
20 Life Drawing, 2008 63 x 50.5 cms Pencil on paper
21 Life Drawing, 2008 63 x 51 cms Pencil on paper
22 Life Drawing, 2008 63 x 50 cms Pencil on paper 33
Unfired Treacle and Seated Nude, 2017 34
23 Treacle 44 x 40 cms Slip-trailed, lead glazed, red earthenware 35
Detail of studio interior, 2017 Line drawings of slip-trailed jugs and dishes from Aberystwyth ceramics collections and related source material
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24 Seated Nude 56 x 23 x 20 cms Slip-trailed, lead glazed earthenware 38
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25 Nude with Vessel 21 x 15 x 11 cms Lead glazed earthenware 40
26 Two Nudes 22 x 17 x 12.5 cms Lead glazed earthenware 41
27 Standing Nude 20 x 8 x 11 cms Cobalt slips under a lead glaze earthenware 42
28 Standing Nude 20 x 8 x 6 cms Lead glazed earthenware 43
29 Artist and Model 21 x 18 x 12 cms Lead glazed earthenware 44
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Philip Eglin BORN 1959 Gibraltar TRAINED 1983-86 Royal College of Art 1979-82 Staffordshire Polytechnic AWARDS 2017 The Wakelin Award 1996 Jerwood Prize for Applied Arts 1993 Arts Foundation Fellowship SELECTED SOLO EXHIBITIONS 2017 The Wakelin Award 2016 Kick the Bucket, Marsden Woo Gallery, London 2015 Slipping the Trail (touring exhibition), Aberystwyth Arts Centre, Aberystwyth, Wales 2013 Nice Pair of Jugs, Marsden Woo Gallery, London 2011 Mould Store, Spode Factory Site, British Ceramics Biennial, Stoke-on-Trent Mixed Marriages, Blackwell, the Arts and Crafts House, Cumbria 2009 Popes, Pin-ups and Pooches, The Scottish Gallery, Edinburgh 2008 Hands Off Berbatov, Barrett Marsden Gallery, London Spiritual Heroes, Glynn Vivian Art Gallery, Swansea 2007 Borrowings, Nottingham Museum and Art Gallery, Nottingham Dean Project, SOFA, New York, USA 2006 Barrett Marsden Gallery, London 2005 Franklin Parrasch Gallery, New York, USA 2004 The Scottish Gallery, Edinburgh 2003 Garth Clark Gallery, New York, USA Barrett Marsden Gallery, London 2001 Barrett Marsden Gallery, London Victoria & Albert Museum, London 2000 The Scottish Gallery, Edinburgh Garth Clark Gallery, New York, USA
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SELECTED PUBLICATIONS 2015 Slipping the Trail, David Whiting, Aberystwyth University 2011 Mixed Marriage(s), Philip Eglin Tony Hayward, Lakeland Arts Trust 2009 Popes, Pin-ups and Pooches, The Scottish Gallery, Edinburgh 2008 Eglins’ Etchings, Philip Eglin Tony Hayward, Eglin Hayward 2007 Borrowings, Philip Eglin Tony Hayward, Notts Museum and Art Gallery 2006 The Ceramic Narrative, Matthias Ostermann, Pennsylvania Press 2003 Sexpots – Eroticism in Ceramics, Paul Mathieu, A&C Black 2001 Postmodern Ceramics, Mark Del Vecchio, Thames & Hudson SELECTED PUBLIC COLLECTIONS British Council Victoria & Albert Museum, London The Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge National Museums Scotland, Edinburgh Liverpool Museum and Art Gallery Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery Mint Museum, North Carolina, USA Stedelijk Museum, The Netherlands MIMA, Middlesbrough Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Texas, USA La Piscine Museum, Roubaix, France Sèvres Museum, Paris, France National Museum Cardiff, Wales Crafts Study Centre Collection, Farnham Aberystwyth University, Wales Glynn Vivian Art Gallery, Wales
SELECTED TEACHING Royal College of Art, London Camberwell College of Arts Alfred University, New York, USA College of G and C Bornholm, Denmark Harbourfront Centre, Toronto, Canada Falmouth College of Art Dundee College of Art Loughborough College of Art Wolverhampton University Staffordshire University Eton College
Philip Eglin is represented by Marsden Woo Gallery, London
Philip Eglin’s ongoing watering can collection, 2017 47
Published by The Scottish Gallery to coincide with the exhibition PHILIP EGLIN: UNFINISHED BUSINESS 3 August – 2 September 2017 To Jennet For putting up with my workshop infiltrating to all parts of the house and beyond! To Oliver For having such a good eye www.olivereglin.com Exhibition can be viewed online at www.scottish-gallery/philipeglin ISBN 978-1-910267-64-6 All photography by Oliver Eglin except pages 6, 15, 16, 32-33, 34, 35-36, 40-41, 44-45, 46, 49 taken by the artist Printed by Barr Colour Printers All rights reserved. No part of this catalogue may be reproduced in any form by print, photocopy or by any other means, without the permission of the copyright holders and of the publishers.
16 Dundas Street, Edinburgh EH3 6HZ +44 (0) 131 558 1200 mail@scottish-gallery.co.uk | www.scottish-gallery.co.uk Right: Philip Eglin with Nelson at home, June 2017 48
Philip Eglin