Yesterday I went to Paris to attend the extraordinary funeral of the teacher who changed the course of my life Philippe Gaulier. In the sometimes murky world of artist training Gaulier is perhaps the most widely and wildly misunderstood pedagogue of all. Perhaps we all assembled from around the world yesterday – how many? maybe 600 of us – because we wanted to hold onto that magical thread of his teaching specifically by being together…because we were there…because we know it. Perhaps we all feel tired by having to listen – every time his name comes up – to the broken record of criticism spewing from the mouths of people who never even went to his school regarding his somewhat unorthodox teaching style. As Simon McBurney put it he was –
‘provocative, demanding, deliberately inappropriate and utterly hilarious’
The elusive cornerstone of his school was to find that ‘complicité’ on which McBurney, Arden and Magni founded the namesake company – the inferred danger and delight in being connected (with each other, with the audience) when we play. Do we have pleasure to be on the stage? If not why bore us? ’Adios, sit down immediately, my little friend’. Gaulier actors read audience in a way that no other actors do and that is what I am proud to know. It will be in my bones. It was in the bones of us, connected together when we – a giant congregation – burst into ‘Non, Je ne regrette rien’ along with Piaf as we saw the old fella off on his way. And we might be messy and we may not do things ‘correctly’ but we will do it with heart and a kind of passion that is very rarely really seen on stage. Spontaneous, huge applause, whooping, cheering, Bravo, Bravo went off as he was carried up the long theatrical staircase to disappear into the glittery backdrop of blue-sky mosaics of La Coupole in Pere Lechaise cemetery.
I began at Gaulier’s school aged 25, just two months after losing my mother. Philippe taught me to feel again and how to be free.
Why am I writing about this here? Because what I am looking for is not and should not be definitive or even precisely known. This is the same for fine art, for performance, for poetry, for playwriting, for art installation, for ceramics, for concept art, for music – definitely not for music – for opera, for dance, for education…for making anything at all really, I think.
Had the most amazing and generous tutorial with Jonathan. I’ve been feeling really stuck, whilst at the same time because of the complexities of the firing schedule at my studio (as detailed in my earlier blog) I’m having to press on and make regardless of stuckness, in order to have something for the interim show. Not a great way to nurture my developing practice.
During the tutorial, where we talked a lot about my multi-disciplinary practice and what that brings, I talked about the situation in devised theatre processes where it’s agreed that we’re stuck and we’ll have to wait. In my company I used to refer to it as ‘waiting outside the cave until the dragon wants to come out’. Mike Shepherd from Kneehigh frequently used the phrase ‘hold your nerve’. And Kasia Zaremba-Byrne, a brilliant polish movement director, will often pause during choreo sessions and say ‘we’re really in the sauerkraut’.
Am trying to refine what I want to explore here. Pull the threads together. There’s something that’s very clearly pertinent to my positionally as a ceramicist – given that ceramics once fired are fixed in time – and that I’ve come from a theatre background. A theatre background specifically rooted in liveness and improvisation. So it feels like time is going to be important. Theatre is ephemeral, transient, here and now and then gone. Ceramic is fixed in time, it survives thousands of years. Being one of man’s first discoveries it sits deep in our consciousness that ceramic endures.
But at the same time – the opposite is also true – ceramics break.
Liveness, ethereal, transient…here and gone…fragility.
The other – not unrelated – interest is movement. My theatre background is largely physical, and so far I have choreographed my ceramic figures in dynamic spatial relationships. Which does in turn create story.
I’m aware of ceramicists who have a performative element to their work. My pal Shane Keeling climbs on ladders to drop his pots to the ground. And the artist Vidya Thirunarayan I met at the talk recently incorporates raw clay into her dance performances. There is more to explore there, but I notice I am not drawn to performing in my fine art practice. The challenge for me is finding the place where my performance experience intersects with my ceramic practice, without ceramics becoming consumed into my performance practice.
Jonathan asks – is it about the concepts, the shape or the material itself that you’re interested in?
We talk about am I looking at movement in a phenomenological sense, or putting in mechanics so things move? Maybe movement isn’t the right word – maybe it’s more about space and distance and relationship. The capture of the quality of movement (as per The Futurists explorations) seems too literal.
Previously I thought about Puppeteers keeping puppets ‘live’ by breath-work.
Maybe the word is breath.
Breathing space.
Breath = life force.
I keep returning to an assumption that I’m somehow obliged to abstract the figure because that’s what ceramicists do… (This is where trends and fashion are unhelpful). A counter to that assumption is Claire Partington, a powerful ceramic artist that I love who…makes extraordinary ceramic figures. Satirical, feminist, referencing flouncy 18th Century porcelain figurines – and with a theatricality and sense of space that I can relate to.
And that leads us to porcelain, how I have become captivated by this self-glazing kind called Parian. And how I felt when I opened the kiln door, how perfect my Parian pots were (to me). Want to note here this was quite an emotional session, my recent ADHD diagnosis came to the fore again because I’m seeing that my hampering perfectionism is infact me compensating for something / everything. When you’ve just discovered an entirely different truth about who you’ve been your whole life, trying to find what’s authentic is hard.
But also I am still me.
I want to capture here somehow how meandering this tutorial / conversation is, because writing it down from my notes, it’s useful to notice that process of circling past the idea and back again.
Jonathan says that this kind of grappling does come before a breakthrough.
Then I have this thought that if the ceramics are fixed maybe something else moves them, the floor perhaps. A designer Jon Bausor that I worked with when directing a Ionesco play ‘The New Tenant’ at the Young Vic created a mechanism to vibrate the floor so that furniture could move by itself. (This cuts a very long story short – the Tech was an all-nighter!)
Jonathan finds me an instructable site about making a Chladni Plate, which uses low-frequency sound to create vibrations. And tells me about an experimentation where bass sound caused an artwork he made, involving toy cows in a fish tank of milk, to move into formation. (I am nearly dismantling my bass amp at the end of this tutorial but then remember…it’s my bass amp).
And then things come full circle for me because the missing piece is about the audience. If I don’t want to perform but want to leave my work in a place for the audience to experience something, how do I create that sense of liveness, that sense of spontaneity, that transient quality that gives the audience space to dream, experience and feel? To be agents of their own interpretation. I tell Jonathan about Yuki Nakamura’s ‘Fragile Like Life’ – the temporality of the deflated porcelain-cast footballs in a place where people are considering life and death. The reference to life – and actually to breath – and to play and joy.
Maybe that’s why I’m currently drawn to porcelain. It’s ethereal, nebulous and it feels fragile and precious. People have a visceral reaction to the idea of porcelain breaking.
Perhaps my figures move on this vibrating surface. And they might fall off and break. I might orchestrate that, or leave it entirely to chance. I could even fire something once – they’d be fragile but that’s ok.
Finding the something that allows the audience some breathing space. Jonathan reminds me that I’d spoken about placing objects in the space, the space between, the sharing of space and the dialogue between.
Gaby Mlynarczyk at the talk spoke about the negative space. Painters understand negative space. But I’m not sure it’s something we often think about with ceramics because the focus is on the thing, the material, the object itself.
I began this tutorial full of panic at my dwindling options due the the firing schedule shenanigans and the time ceramics take. I leave full of inspiration, with ideas to spare, having waded out of the sauerkraut.
Jonathan – ‘You know on a foggy morning you know the sun is there. That lingering in the fog can be really beneficial’.
(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.
Some weeks ago we were challenged to take a risk. I didn’t do it because at the time I couldn’t think about what sort of risk I wanted to take. My first thoughts about artists taking risks involves them making themselves extremely vulnerable, or exploring things that are really confrontational to people with conservative values (Yoko Ono, Marina Abramovic, Tracey Emin). Thinking about my own blocks and resistance I noticed that risk, for me, is bound up with taste. I’ve made a judgement call somewhere along the way where X is ok and Y is not.
Somehow particularly in ceramics. Perhaps I’ve picked this up from other makers I look up to.
And partly it’s something about the fact that ceramics is tough badge to earn – it’s very technical, there are no shortcuts to experience, it’s slow and resource-hungry. You had better get it right.
In my case I am drawn to the human experience – being from a physical theatre and story-telling background. And yet I think I have an aversion to the figure in figurative ceramics – to capturing a human form. So thus far I have kind of abstracted that by creating three-legged or pot-like figures. Which look kind of alien – and that also doesn’t satisfy me. I also often get the feedback that they’re ‘cute’ which makes me feel sad.
So maybe the biggest risk for me is to explore the human form.
I decide to spend some time with the the human figure. I get three books out of the library about the human figure in ceramics. My husband says ‘why are they all so creepy?’
I guess the human frozen in time is creepy. You can paint a face on a still thing but it remains a still thing. 2D imposed on 3D. I guess there’s something of the puppet or doll – staple figures in any horror movie. I wonder if the idea of the clay pot surviving the centuries is inevitably somewhere in our minds when looking at a ceramic object?
In my theatre practice I have often worked with puppetry and one of the key things about a puppet is to ‘keep it breathing’. Even when it’s still, we feel the breath. Puppeteers think about the breath all the time – they breathe with the puppet. If you stop the puppet’s body from having it’s life breath – say you just sit it down and move away – we say it ceases to ‘live’.
You might think going into the studio and making a real human face isn’t going to kill me. (I go to life drawing classes, I enjoy figurative paintings…). But when I walk into my studio and try to make a figurative head I feel kind of sick. If I’m honest – I feel kind of cheesy. I tinker away with the human head and I hate it and hide it in a box. I explore other less realistic, more abstracted faces. I dislike them all.
I enjoy the making. There are technical considerations that are interesting to me – finishing a head or even a whole body one has to then slice it in half and hollow it out. If the thing is going to stand on two feet – there has to be consideration of how it balances. How will it sit in the kiln. It’s arms need to be propped up or they might warp. I can imagine that making a truly realistic full size bust might be enjoyably challenging.
I don’t have a satisfying conclusion to this experiment. I stop short of firing the things because I hate them so much.
But I push on and decide to commit to making an angry menopausal wolf-woman, with high heels and a long bushy tail. I think it might be the ugliest thing I’ve ever seen in my life. Someone comes a long and says ‘oh, cute!’
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?
First tutorial with Jonathan, a totally brilliant and surprising and far-reaching conversation. Trying here to get it all down but actually it’s going to be more like a list I think, of chapters to dip into as I go along.
I guess the main headline is what has my path been before, is it going to beautifully joined up (as I’ve been thinking) or is it going to be healthily separated. What do I want out of this practice? What can I take with me and what can I leave behind.
Why have I chosen clay now, or rather as I see it sometimes clay has chosen me? I know there is something about my theatre practice being about liveness, physicality, spontaneity and movement – and there being something about clay being the opposite of that – a material that when fired transforms into ceramic material that is fixed in time for thousands of years.
Something about holding onto something? About anchors? About trying to bring something to stillness?
All of my practice so far has been collaborative. It has been ‘we’. That the ideas of the collective can – or must? – be more rich than the individual. But is that true? Is that still true for me? Where am I in that?
It has just popped into my head that a text-driven theatre director associated with Battersea Arts Centre many years ago called devised practice ‘fuzzy compromised theatre born out of antagonism’.
This still makes me laugh.
We laugh when we recognise something painful and true.
Anyway.
Clay. Clay is also a tricksy collaborator – it’s needy, unpredictable, it actually remembers wrong decisions you’ve made and changed and it throws those bad decisions back at you when you open the kiln door. And it is also compelling, essential, honest, solid, real.
We talk about being comfortable with process. I notice when thinking about what I want to make I am looking for a finished idea. I visualise a kind of finished thing. But there is something here to borrow from theatre practice – a phrase we use ‘don’t jump through the steps’ – when actors don’t see all the steps or beats in the story or moment.
How can I bring that sense of movement to my practice, rather than go straight to end product. Of course improv has lessons for me here. This translates to what processes I am using in the studio – the mesmerising pull of the wheel versus the time it takes to master the wheel. Perhaps hand building might offer me more freedom right now? Collaborating and ‘yes and…’ing with the clay itself.
Also we discussed the kind of things I feel blocked by – work I like and don’t like – what does it feel like when my practice is going well.
There is something about essence. About kind of finding the seam, moving between different ideas and thoughts towards something particular and tiny that feels true. You know true when you see it. I remember bursting into tears when I saw an Edward Hopper painting in the Smithsonian Washington DC, from some distance away. Tracey Emin’s scratchy nudes. You feel something at a guttural level. Maybe I just need to dial back and notice what does speak to my gut, and what doesn’t.
Essence. I don’t love all the work I make but I do love the placement of a leg on one of my three legged triped pots.
We decide it might be useful just to focus on that.
Completely surreally I am in New York in a show on 42nd Street. I am doing what I know, I guess I am being in my element in many ways, it’s kind of dreamlike, like literally a dream you have as a child – and it’s fun as hell and I’m working the stupid long hours, living on sugar and carbs and it’s stressful. I am so tired and my eyes kind of hurt in their sockets.
And I’ve got to say I am pumped up because I’m making hundreds of folk laugh and doing it well.
I don’t know why I am writing this apart from it’s going to be all joined up. I don’t know how. How do I use what I know so far, about play, about clowning, about improv, about acting and about stories. How does this all fit together?
What I am doing here is the thing that I know and understand in my bones. When I started to make independent theatre I didn’t know what the hell I was doing. I worked from my hungry 25 year old gut instinct – and the things I made were some part made in thrall of the artists I admired and the other part made in punk reaction against the kind of theatre I hated. How was it then?
Some of those admired theatre peers are still doing exactly the same thing, So sure of their practice they will say things like ‘this is acting / that is not acting’ with such conviction. I used to admire that and wished I was so certain about what my practice was, to wish I wasn’t so messy and so magpie-like in my tastes. Perhaps if I was like them I’d be more…legit?
There is a story about artists that I like that says we are either dolphins or otters, I think it was from Neil Gaiman.
If the dolphin does something successful and everyone applauds / throws him a fish etc – the dolphin will repeat the action. Again and again. More fish. More applause.
The dolphin will put on the dolphin show.
The otter will always do something new. For the fun, for the curiosity. The otter isn’t interested in repeating the thing to be thrown a fish. You can’t really train an otter. The otter wants to play.
I watch the recording back of our session last week. About keeping moving, about not knowing being the foundation of critical thinking. About questions without a finite answer.
Something also clicks for me when Sofi does her presentation. Sofi’s work is beautifully raw and serious but also…it’s funny. She uses humour. She brings levity to serious ideas – from what I see so far.
Alex Murdoch, Artist 