Alex Murdoch, Artist

Tag: audience

  • Why should we care?

    Things are sort of joining up with my theatre practice.  This is my third tutorial with Jonathan.

    I’ve been compartmentalising the two things which makes no sense.  I talk to Jonathan about the themes in my recent blogs – looking more closely at my theatre making influences. 

    I also enjoyed writing in the Rebecca Fortnum class.  I hadn’t done it in a while because of a block, and a situation with someone which put me off.  But mostly I didn’t write because I felt I didn’t want to make my plays work in the conventional dramatic arc way.  People who commissioned my plays would say they want form-breaking plays but then by the second draft they wanted a dramatic arc.  And actually as a theatre maker I’d always been taking risks with the form.

    I’m pushing about the research question, it’s shifting a bit.  

    It’s becoming more about how the audience has agency.  And the Jennifer Doyle book, the thing about feeling.  And how that is in contemporary art – it’s really slippery – how artists deal with feelings and audience.

    Jonathan – how do you define the difference between audience agency and audience interaction?

    I think in so-called immersive work audience interaction is so ‘pat’ – we did this and that made the audience do that.  It manipulates the audience – it’s like there’s not respect.  It sort of feels as exclusive as how people describe regular theatre.  The people who attend live art or immersive art – it’s like an in-joke.  A club.  It’s inaccessible.

    We talk a bit about how Tim’s play Toto Kerblammo uses binaural sound – and Jonathan has played a lot with that.  The difference being spatial for the sound.  So Tim and his sound designer have imagined how the sound of human feelings are for a dog.  ‘This is what you sound like when you feel abandoned’.  Beautiful. 

    Jonathan – I asked about agency and interaction.  You took audience interaction as an actor interacting.  I was thinking about the work in say an exhibition.

    Interactive art can be quite shallow e.g. digital computing ‘I move and something changes’.  Audience as paint brush.  So is the difference respect – in the word agency?

    I say yes – respect for their intelligence and imagination.  You could say when you control the entire experience – which theatre tries to do, tries to shape – there’s less space for the audience.  But perhaps a piece of abstract art may leave tonnes of space for the audience to do what they want with it.  But also there’s a sort of coolness – ‘make of it what you will’ – that the intentions of the artist is so distant to the response that you could say the artist doesn’t seem to care?

    Jonathan – is time to do with that?  It starts at 7.30pm – is there a fundamental difference there?

    And if you’re not controlling what time the audience spend there, say maybe something happens at 4 but otherwise you can go in and out.   Then what? 

    Jonathan loved the Rachel Maclean show in Liverpool which does loop round and round, but had a clock counting down and if you see it on that particular time there is an experience like theatre.  She uses curtains opening automatically at certain times.  

    I wish I could see it.  

    We talk about actor Ralph Little playing being tortured in a production of The Spy Who Came In From The Cold – which Jonathan saw recently and felt really uncomfortable at.  There is an experience of coming outside of the show/story and being live in a room when Little has his head held underwater.   Are you watching anymore or worrying about being the audience member who witnessed the accidental death of a beloved TV actor?

    Of course it will have been done really safely – a tube, a safe word etc – although it was pretty well done.  Still viscerally different from watching it on film.

    I say that very few film-makers have ever got away with doing ‘meta’ film.  We buy into the game that it is real.  

    We talk about the sense that the audience have more agency in the object animation theatre piece I saw ‘Matter Era’ – because they know more about what’s going on than the puppeteers with magnets under the metal stage.  It was time and time again about jeopardy and failure – and like improv – the audience understood that in the moment.

    I found the design breathtakingly simple.  And it was a really long time before anything happened. Too long in theatre terms.  Playwright / Director David Lan (formerly at the Young Vic) – used to say when a show starts there is a finite amount of time for the audience before they lose interest.  But we didn’t really even notice Matter Era start…just these oily blueberries started to just…be there.  You couldn’t quite say what those things were representing, the furry things that were breathing, the sticks, silly bits of string.  You projected what you saw in it.  

    It pushed the limits of what time should do in theatre.  

    The sound designer was improvising off the action in the room.  

    It was just wild.  

    The way the final image arrived out of the various objects, was kind of an accident, an improvised story sort of, of failure and effort.  

    It felt like the objects had an inner life.

    In collusion with the audience.

    I describe Animo an improvised studio show I used to do with Improbable Theatre, where sometimes we would bring pieces of newspaper to life.

    Matter Era was. Right on the edge of visual art.  And theatre.

    People kind of respected the space, but didn’t interfere – respecting the rules of the game – which was to discover it.  It wasn’t like some performance art piece where it was more ‘I left this here do something with it’

    We talk a bit about the problems of badly done performance art – the lack of consideration of the space, where the audience are to be, how the elements are going to play out and whether that has even been tested. Surely there’s a way of making good quality decisions about how performance art is going to work – even if you then want to break all the conventions and ‘rules’?

    With Matter Era you had that sense of being in safe hands even though they were improvising, and even though they were pushing their control of the work to the limits.

    And yet like improv – if it’s really genuine and you put aside comedy sketches – you have to embrace the possibility of it really failing.  If it’s to be really improvised.  

    There are ways of controlling improv so it doesn’t fail – putting in tricks and landing places, rehearsing stock moves, casting big star improvisors who always make a ‘good night of it’.  All of the mid-scale improv does this.  But real improvised work is different.

    The audience embracing the possibility of failure.  That’s the sweet spot.

    Jonathan makes a note of this – as he feels from his perspective that this line of enquiry could make a research paper that’s really worth reading.  Bringing that theatre maker perspective – how the audience have agency (rather than just interaction), teasing that and understanding that.  That could be really valuable for Fine Art practice. That has implications of what we make. And how we curate and set up exhibitions.  

    A PHD colleague of Jonathan’s – writing about Curation – was thinking about ‘palette cleansers’ – how in a world where we’re bombarded with millions of images – can we visually cleanse the pallets and experience the flavours.  A bit like the theatre – the rituals of the stairs and the tickets and the seats.  Jonathan singing You’ll Never Walk Alone at the football in Liverpool with the years of history collectively – we’re doing something together in the moment.  A lot to tease out and maybe beneficial.

    Coming full circle – I’ve been thinking about this all my life.

    But what are the lessons that can be learned across those boundaries for art practice?

    Because as Doyle says – there’s a sort of coolness – it often feels it doesn’t sort of matter to the artist what happens with the audience experience.  

    It’s about to do with caring about what the audience get.  Without contriving it.  

    I talk about my Improbable Theatre friend Lee Simpson’s idea of finding a perfect moment in theatre.  He tells this story.  It’s like a shy deer has wandered on – and we all hold our breath because a wrong feeling or noise and it will run off.  The key point is liveness.  It’s just wandered in.  Now we could shoot the deer, stuff it, wheel it in on a trolley at the same moment every night.  But it won’t be the same because it won’t be spontaneous.

    There’s a fragility. Allowing the audience’s care to be part of the experience.

    Jonathan – what are the lessons of that for an exhibition that may be open for a month or more?

    There can be some kind of liveness on the opening night, but the rest of the time?

    Could you have the quality of the deer in a piece that stays for a long time with no-one present.

    Is it about time-based work?  Or can you have a sense of spontaneity in the way the work looks or is set up so it has a sense of liveness?

    Gosh I need another year.

    Quote Jonathan found recently – ‘All art is the creation of forms symbolic of human feeling’ – Susan Langer?

    The objects in Matter Era had feeling.  I remember a theatre making peer of mine Paul Hunter (of Told By An Idiot) saying that if a character is angry instead of writing dialogue literally, like you would say in Eastenders, we might just see them burst into flames.

    What’s really speaking to me in Doyle’s work is there’s this coolness in some contemporary art that leaves me cold.  Is it coolness towards the audience?

    There is space and agency for what the audience does with it – do what you like with it… but where does that tip over into ‘I don’t even care what your response is or even if I did anything for you at all – you’re so far away from me’.

    A colleague of Jonathan’s wrote a course called Public Art.  It would sit within socially engaged practice (he notes an essay worth reading that’s very against socially engaged practice).  Joseph Beuys talks of Social Sculpture – the idea of audience and artist are together forming things.  It’s let see what happens – put things in place and see what happens.  Anyway one of his definitions of whether art is public or not (Duchamp said it becomes art when audience sees it) – he said a work of art is not a work of art unless two strangers talk about it together.  

    He was thinking about work in a Gallery.  Can be love, anger or whatever it is that provokes you but you spoke to someone you don’t know and a whole different experience appears.  A thought experiment – it needs that level of engagement before it becomes something real.  

    And I think there’s that thing about access – and how I think a lot of ‘immersive theatre’ is an exclusive club.  Who’s going to turn to the person next to them? A middle class person could do that like a shot. 

    But also non-‘arts attendees’ might say ‘what’s that? My five year old son could do that’

    Who owns it?

    Jonathan talks of a 13th Century painting bought by the city of Hull when it was City of Culture.  It cost 3 million pounds.  He remembers a guy with his kid, didn’t look like he went to shows like this.  He walked straight up to it.  He said to his son ‘That’s ours that is’, then to Jonathan ‘It’s good isn’t it?’  That sense of civic pride.  700 years after the thing was made.

    Jonathan thinks there’s a lot in this line of enquiry.  “It’s a really interesting paper but it plays into your practice, there’s value in it.  

    Accept your expertise and bring that across to this – that is real value – whatever it looks like.

    It’s a big area sure, so you’ll have to narrow it down, but embrace your decades of expertise and all of us will benefit.”  

  • Perverse conditions

    Had a long chat with Jonathan about the feedback on the Assessment and what is most helpful for me right now.  Unpacking what I mean by something more critical, and tangible to build on.  Especially in regards to research.  Quite rightly he asked what would I tell myself in regards to feedback and this opened up a bigger thought about why I’m doing the MA.  I see my imposter syndrome – in fact I bore myself with the amount of space that takes up in my blog.   And I do feel I’m in the right place in terms of my approach to the journey – and take the encouragement to ‘do more of the same’.  But I guess although the aim is independence in one’s practice I’m here for the critical engagement, and ultimately of course if I’m making art it’s not just for me.  Like a hobby or an indulgence or something that exists just for myself.  It is a public thing.

    I want to find out how my work operates in relationship to the world.  To outside myself.  In dialogue with others.  I want to affect people.  

    So unpacking that really helps clarify things for me.  I am engaging with my own conversation with myself.  But I’m here for the rigorousness of criticality and the outside world.  And that doesn’t have to be in the art school tradition of aggressive critiques (we have enough artists who have been trained to talk impressively about their work in written explanation and I’m not convinced there’s much beyond defensiveness sometimes).  I’m glad that this MA puts kindness at the forefront of the journey.  But I’m here to go on a journey of discovery, and that means not just circling around myself, but to make use of the expertise and knowledge of Central Saint Martins. 

    So we unpacked my aims on the Study Statement – which starts with ‘break open my practice’.  Which sounds dramatic to Jonathan, what do I mean?  Actually that is exactly what I mean, I kind of feel that something is too contained, to subject to the demands of the medium and what I expect I have to do with it, the constraints of the firing schedule (always one step forward two steps back – now the firings are apparently fixed dates – but…every 6 weeks as opposed to the monthly on the contract), I feel like I want to put a bomb under my practice in order to see what remains.  

    I want to own it.  Jonathan – own what exactly?

    Well the transition from ideas to making is really clunky.  Sketches to making feels really literal. 

    I talk about the journey from making this thing from ideas to what I presented.  Now as I write this I’m looking in my sketchbook at drawings of Bruegel’s Mad Meg and the Fall of the Rebel Angels.  None of which made it beyond the cutting room floor.  Although actually…the idea of falling did.  So maybe exploring any visual hunch is good.  Blind alleys are maybe more interesting than just sticking to the path.  

    We talked about the qualities of other people’s work that inspires me most – I keep returning to Yuki Nakamura’s ‘Fragile like life’ porcelain footballs.  More than anything I loved with that the concept of play and joy and of breath and life (deflated football) in this sad hospital garden.  And the something so generous about the ‘here and gone’ nature of the installation that speaks to me of the weirdness of time spent in the bubble of caring and hospital visits.  

    I also speak about my friend Tim Crouch’s play An Oak Tree.  I’m going to talk about that in the next blog post (which I was halfway through writing when this Jonathan conversation came in) 

    Tim is an interesting example for me.  An actor turned playwright doesn’t quite sum it up.  Aside from Caryl Churchill he’s probable the most ground-breaking playwright in the UK.   He’s kind of moved playwrighting towards conceptual art.  But what I want to say at this point is – there is this care and attention, simply to Nakamura’s piece, of how the work really works for an audience. Beyond basic curatorial choices, drilling deeper into how and why the audience meets the work in the way that it does.  

    It’s that specificity I am after.  

    That maybe what ‘owning it’ would look like.  I understand audience (Gaulier taught me that, improv taught me that, making site specific theatre on beaches and in village halls and working mens clubs, my indie theatre company was all about how to mess with the live experience).  Staging the chairs and the figures and the plinth and being very deliberate about how they were presented in the space was a positive thing.  

    So the space between my experience and what I want to do with my work is at the pull between intention and spontaneity.  

    When it’s out the in the world I can’t control the experience in the way I can with live performance.  Although our long form improv shows were in the the chaos of the unknown we did work in great detail on how we controlled that one sentence set-up at the start for the audience – the only scripted line – in order to allow the audience to put aside their expectations, nervousness and cynicism about whether it’s even improvised at all – so that they could get on with experiencing the thing we wanted them to experience. 

    I think I’m often most creative when I’m creating perverse conditions for my work.  

    And perhaps that’s what I want to break open.  

    Feeling.  Relationship. What relates.  What is affective?

    This is not about controlling meaning.  This is not about starting with the end in mind.  This is definitely not about a textual explanation on a card on the wall.  This is about interrogating the conditions in which the audience meets the work whilst – and this is the paradoxical bit perhaps – whilst giving them space to do whatever they want with it.  

    So to go back to improv – we are letting go of all control over the structure and meaning and in fact also the quality perhaps of the story we tell – in favour of allowing the wild ride of spontaneity.  And we’re allowing them to believe in something that we’re told is impossible – because conventional practice would have us believe it takes one genius man in a room to write a play.   Jonathan reminded me of this quote from Keith Johnstone’s seminal ‘Impro’


    “People try to use what they know. They want to be ‘right.’ But I prefer to see people who don’t know what they’re doing and take strange paths.”

    I worked though some big things in this generous conversation with Jonathan in how my audience meet the work.  Or maybe the question is what is it about the work that allows my practice to meet the audience.

    That’s maybe why I asked the question ‘what’s the most exciting thing that is growing’.  Because that’s what I need to know, and that’s not ‘what’s most exciting’ to me.  That’s an outward seeking question, in relation with my work and the world. 

  • On the outside looking in

    I’m reading ‘Hold it against me’ by Jennifer Doyle about difficulty and emotion in art.  It’s waking something up in me, have only just begun it so maybe I will write more on this later.  It’s making me feel there’s a purpose I can latch onto here.  I know that seems ridiculous – as if there isn’t a purpose when of course there are a million kinds of purpose to the art I might want to make but right now my brain is a bit clouded, overcast.  Too many open tabs.

    The interim show was a wonderful experience.  I still feel strangely unattached to what I made although I feel I did resolve it successfully and the piece got a lot of positive responses.  I want to understand why I feel so flat about it.  But also, as art critic Jerry Saltz says – your art is a flatworm (earthworm in UK) – cut it in half and from it grows another piece.  I love this idea.  From the piece I made I am drawn to the the feeling of the figures – and perhaps I should commit to exploring the figure more – people / character is something I’ve studied hard as an actor / theatre maker.  Story.  The relationship with the audience.  I also enjoyed the spatial dynamics, the setting of the multiple chairs.  The box.  I like the glaze.  But why this material?  Why clay?

    I am feeling today at odds with the ceramics world. I’m mentoring for Arts Emergency – and it feels so good to be doing this – I am sick of and angry about how privilege in the arts stores up opportunity for itself and it’s friends and how that depletes the art world for everyone. The theatre world witters on about this while doing nothing in general but the ceramics scene seems entirely unaware about the need to address inequality at all – in this most resource-hungry of practices.  I am trying to find a way to help raise maybe $30k for my mentee who has got into the prestigious acting school Julliard in NYC.  It’s a gargantuan task.  Ironically at the same time I’m not sure if I can pay my rent.  

    I needed a break after the intensity of the first assessments and the interim show.  Brain depleted. RSD. The residency week was glorious.  The cohort continue to inspire and delight me – we are such a cast of characters.  Each one of us so different from the next, and the sense of a community of support and practice is real – I feel so blessed.  It kind of feels like a bit of a dream, to spend a week with these brilliant people.  The printmaking workshop was a highlight and I’m galvanised to make more 2D work and maybe look more at printmaking on clay.  I also saw some really brilliant art shows and discovered some new galleries.  On the subject again of money I had a fascinating conversation with Betty on the bus to Peckham about art that fetishises poverty – or ‘poverty porn’ as we call it when it shows up in playwrighting.  

    An artist who could never make poverty porn, although she will no doubt have been accused of it, is Tracey Emin.  Her Tate show tore me apart.  She speaks about her reality, she is an open wound.  Surprising number of men seem to think she should shut up and stop going on about rape and trauma.  

    She is an artist and she works with the material she has – her life.  Do I, could I, do that? (I remember actually after Nick Cave, yes he’s a man yes, after Nick Cave wrote a beautiful song about the recent death of his son and some girl I know from my hometown said on social media that it was distasteful and I…I have no words to say about that person.  The guy is a f-ing artist)

    I like that Doyle differentiates between two kinds of difficult.  The intellectually challenging ‘difficult’ art turns away from the spectator who feels inadequate, not ‘fully initiated’ into the ‘sociology of contemporary art.’  The only feeling for the spectator I guess is – they are on the outside looking in.  I can relate to that.  And then – and this may relate to my research – she talks of difficult art where the spectator is inextricably complicit in a kind of witnessing that is very personal.

    ‘This is where ideology does it’s most devastating work…This is where we come to know the contours of our selves, our bodies, our sense of soul’

    I’m feeling kind of worked up right now as you can probably hear.  I feel like something is coming and not coming.  I’m blocked.  I wrote to Jonathan to say I was confused about the feedback on Unit One, it was clearly full of praise but nothing solid I could build on, I wanted more specificity.

    I’m really looking forward to the class starting up again after this three week break, to seeing everyone, to find out what’s next.  

    My writing mentor Chris Thorpe once gave me the most useful feedback about a first draft I was making –

    ‘What’s the most difficult thing that this is not saying?’

  • Je ne regrette rien 

    Remembering Philippe Gauler 1943-2026

    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.  

  • Nebulous

    Transience and permanence, the constant

    Monuments + sculpture – marking in time making valid – heaviness

    Transience – ephemeral, nebulous – lightness

    And audience 

    Experience of art – the transient nature of the encounter = becomes validated by memory and the quality of experience

    How it makes you feel

    What you feel is how you remember.  (Often attributed to Maya Angelou – ‘…people will forget what you said, they will forget what you did, but they will never forget how they made you feel’)

    Transience is moving, through time, moving on from, beginnings and endings, here and gone

    Permanence is stillness – rocks, monuments, weightiness, significance

    But in theatre / improv audiences experience of something fleeting – the encounter feels special, unique, personal

    It is a two way relationship.  Not standing in front of.  But dancing with.

    Theatre and improvisation know about the value of transience to audience.  And specifically the shared experience of the moment.  The audience completes the work.

    Museums, archives, monuments, the canon of gold framed paintings, arguably most 2D visual art and all sculpture – deal with fixing in time, history, longevity, statements.  (There is hierarchy at work here – power – who choses what is permanent?)

    Ceramics in particular is elemental – earth and fire.  Survival of Mesopotamian pots – trace of man’s first technological advancement – but also evidence artistic expression.  They tell stories.

    Which is where theatre meets because it tells stories. 

    Time tells stories – beginning middle and end.  

    Without end – no story…?

    Or without end – audience completes story?

    Where is the audiences agency in the work – this is crucial to me. 

    Gilchrist – where we put our attention…attending as a moral act which changes the world…who does the attending?

    Artist role to draw attention.  To focus – to say look, here?  At what I see?

    How do you leave space?

    Notion that when we accept that there is no permanence that everything is changing, we are freed from fear of death and endings – Buddhism.

    Gruf Rhys –

    “Rocks are slow life”

    Even rocks are moving, changing.

    Climate disaster, landscapes shifting, mud moving…clay and earth subject to the elements.

    Toute Bouge (Everything moves / is moving) – Jacques Lecoq text

    Lecoq students study elements – physically.

    Presence in the theatre feels and looks like stillness but isn’t stillness, it’s kind of a vibration.  It’s an energy.  

    You can teach it to actors by making them play Grandmother’s Footsteps – when the child is forced to stand ‘like a statue’ – they are in fact holding themselves in preparation for immediate movement when Grandmother’s back is turned.

    Watch a cat pretend to not be about to catch a bird in the garden. 

    What personally does this mean for me?

    Theatre, improv

    Writing

    Making

    Clay

    Artmaking

  • Really in the Sauerkraut

    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’.

  • 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?