Alex Murdoch, Artist

Category: site specific

  • Gifts from the Kiln Gods 

    (Clay in Conversation, Ceramic Research Centre, 16th January)

    I went to a really useful talk at the Ceramics Research Centre called ‘Clay in Conversation – Play’. 

    Gaby Mlynarczyk a ceramicist who teaches throwing at my studio makes beautiful work constructed from detritus and accidents from the firing process. ‘Gifted to me by the Kiln Gods’ she says.  She explores environmental concerns, is obsessed by the Great Pacific Garbage Patch – and she’ll cast food waste she’s salvaged in porcelain slip. It’s interesting to me in term of my improvisation practice – she embraces accident in her work, pieces that have fused together in the kiln or disintegrated.  She says it’s a game of trial and error.  ‘I take stuff that has died and try to create a narrative’.

    Gaby talks about the agency of clay – ‘clay is an active partner’.  She also cites Jane Bennett’s Vibrant Matter which by chance comes up several times in this week – in the Art in Context Lecture, in our Thursday session, during my tutorial and then I find the book on Charly Blackburn’s shelf – the aforementioned artist in residence at my studio.

    An idea I’m definitely going to look at is that she starts building one way, then turns the thing over and starts building in another direction.  She calls it Rhizomatic play.  How does she decide it’s finished? ‘I ask myself – has it got energy, is the negative space interesting?’. I’m reminded about bringing my experience of space and audience viewpoint into my work.

    The second talk is Yuki Nakamura.  For ‘Fragile Like Life’ Nakamura used her peculiar collection of deflated footballs.  Cast them in slip and glazes them.  The work was commissioned for a hospital garden, the sort of place where people come to smoke a cigarette having had bad news.  A charged space.  Instead of displaying the artwork on a plinth she rolls the footballs under a hedge, or places them on a bench, or stuck in the branches of a tree.  The work stayed there temporarily – an idea that she was keen on because of the nature of the experience of a number of viewers who stumbled on them for a short moment in time. That might have lifted their spirits.  She observed a doctor trying to kick one and discovering no bounce back, he discovered the piece like a child or an animal, with curiosity and play.

    By chance I get talking to the woman sat next to me Vidya Thirunarayan and she’s writing her PhD  on the relationship of theatre and clay.  We plan to meet and talk more.  

    So again, community.  Serendipity.  Being there and being open.  Noticing threads coming together even if I don’t know how I’ll use them yet. 

  • Thinking or Feeling?

    We talked last week about David Cross and Matthew Cornford’s The Lion and the Unicorn, working on a response to a white cube space, thinking site-specifically, filling the space with coal, creating an environmental statement – and the ethics and integrity of that.  This week we were shown around – via live feed – Bobby Dowler’s exhibition with found and rejected canvases belonging to other artists that Bobby has appropriated, doctored and left open to live curation by visitors who can move and place them as they wish.  Dowler is talking about who own’s art (can these pieces be sold etc) and the place of commerce in the art world.

    Two site-based responses.  This is a language I know – my theatre company made shows on allotments, in shopping centres, working men’s clubs etc.  At the time I thought deeply about audience – and how the cultural dynamic was changed by going to the spaces owned by the audience rather than having them come to our traditional theatre buildings with their red velvet, ornate architecture and weighty cultural baggage and behaviours.

    I also feel now that ‘immersive theatre’ practice has full-circle turned back on it’s original more community-focused and democratising intentions – where now the term ‘immersive’ theatre is guaranteed to bring a set of excluding behaviours, arguably equally elitist as the traditional theatre dynamic, where very knowing audiences are well used to ‘joining in’.  And I feel a little tired of that.

    This all made me think about intention and meaning.  How all-encompassing the idea of concept is in art now, can we even begin to move away from the analysing and deconstructing of ideas, can we ever experience pure feeling in an abstract sense?  I’m interesting in digging into this because while I enjoy pulling apart the artist’s intentions and the success of the realisation of those intentions, I also feel sometimes feels duped by art that is purely a talking thing, a tricksy and gimmicky thing.  

    And what does this all mean for process?  For the sketchbook, for the prototypes, for the technical stuff…especially pertinent in the demands of ceramics as a practice.  

    What do I want to say and how will I want to say it?