Alex Murdoch, Artist

Tag: multi-disciplinary

  • 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.”  

  • On the border of Theatre and Fine Art

    What do I mean by this? I’m picking up some threads of things coming together for me based on some recent theatre experiences which have danced around with the definitions of Theatre and Fine Art.  But are not ‘Live Art’.  Live Art is another thing in my mind – and much less connected to the practice and crafts involved in theatre making and more close to being an area of Fine Art but with liveness and..people..? My definition anyway.  I don’t have many examples in my experience (but am glad to be corrected) of Live Art taking responsibility for it’s audience with any kind of care or skill. Massive generalisation but that’s my experience.

    Two shows I saw recently that made me really sit up. ‘Matter Era’ by Tim Spooner and Terrapin at the Battersea Art Centre – an experimental London venue where I cut my teeth as a messy young theatre maker.  Matter Era was technically a puppetry show, object animation being the preferred term these days – and the craft I’m referring to is the skill of the Puppeteers.  Who remained invisible beneath the metal stage, moving the objects around with magnets.  And most interestingly they couldn’t SEE what they were doing.  (Unless there was some kind of live video feed perhaps?) There was this element of surprise and jeopardy, that you would get in an improvised show, because without a direct manipulation the objects would sometimes fall out of their control.  And that became story. The audience, as in any improvised piece, become complicit moment by moment in that story by being more knowledgable about what was going on above the Puppeteers. (Who are famously shy folk – so there’s something rather lovely about them hiding below with magnets and anonymity).

    Above or On stage – an ethereal wild world of dreams where objects (thinking of Jane Bennet’s book Vibrant Matter) have agency.  None of the objects were realistic or recognisable – sort of like twigs, sort of like fur, sort of like fat blueberries covered in oil.  But all with some kind of recognisable quality we can attach a feeling to.  There was so much space for the audience – which is exactly what I want to deal with – and it was just beautiful.

    I also want to speak about my friend Tim Crouch’s work.  Tim is an extraordinary theatre-maker – after Caryl Churchill I would say he is the most significant experimental theatre writer at work in the UK today.   What I went to see was him in actor-mode rather than his own work – but his take on ‘The Tempest’ at the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse was absolutely in line with his tireless experimentation with the form.  Prospero is normally cited as the Shakespearean hero connected with the idea of forgiveness but Tim’s Prospero as I saw it was not moving on in forgiveness but playing over his wrongs and how to right them over and over on a loop. Perhaps more like we do in life.  As usual he broke most of the rules of theatre – it was quite slow (I felt mesmerically slow but he definitely tests the levels of patience) and it didn’t really end or conclude but rather looped back round again.  Like bitterness does, feeding itself like a beast

    An update to this post: I also saw Tim’s Toto Kerblammo this weekend. (Alot of Tim in my life by chance at the mo, this one he’d invited my mentee Zoe along to his rehearsals for) Kerblammo-ed by this piece which takes the audience into the internal world and sensescape of a child in a coma and her dying dog by using binaural sound on headphones. It was a live play, a radio story, a one on one piece in a way whilst also being a shared experience. Sidenote – it occurs to me I am noticing work that works directly with emotion lately (this the unvoiced topic of child mental health)…

    Got to speak about his play ‘An Oak Tree’.  Inspired by artist Craig Martin’s work that self-declared the glass of water exhibited on a high shelf was in fact an oak tree.  Martin says on the Tate website  –

    “The Oak Tree was meant to be ‘how do I create the maximum imaginable transformation?’ and my way of doing it was to produce no transformation at all.”

    In Tim’s namesake play the second actor has never seen the script before. So their reading of the grieving father they’re playing is loaded with confusion along with those strange blanks and spikes of interrupted thought that anyone who has experienced grief can probably recognise.  

    Tim says – 

    ‘I take responsibility for how audience receive my work’

    This is really speaking to me right now as I reconsider what kind of work I really want to make. 

    As the two disciplines creep towards each other and cross over and meet and join up and speak to each other…

    I want to think more about what it really feels like to be on the receiving end of my art making.  I can take responsibility for that.  

  • The Opposite is Also True

    So finally after all the challenges of firing schedules and making I opened Baby Diana the smaller kiln (being D or ABC – Agnes, Barbara and Collette – names which sound like cool and distant goddesses to me) which I’d tenaciously had to negotiate in this less than ideal process.  

    First of all – the glaze on the large slab built box is the most beautiful effect.  Swamp lichen – a reactive glaze with Crater over it. It looks like water and foam and swimming pools which is a thing colour wise that has been emerging for me for this project.  (I’ve become interested in an extraordinary film called Ten Meter Tower a 17 minute short film training the camera on Swedish people considering jumping off a very high tower in a local pool – which I think is another whole post…)

    It also has a giant crack across the corner side seam.  Where the box fell and was reassembled during making.  When this sort of thing happens (scaling up slab building, the box was tricky) it’s kind of inevitable that even though you fix the seam beautifully, inside and out, and then you even add a little vinegar slip when it’s drying…the clay remembers like a damaged child.  It all comes out when it’s all grown up. 

    So part of a breakthrough was that I was going to explore fragility.  That breaking things may be part of it. It’s almost poetic justice in a way.  But also the perfectionist that haunts and hampers me says – remember that girl on your course last year who used to present all thrown and failed pots as intentional…well…her…

    All sorts of narratives appear such as – ‘hey all the ceramicists know about this kind of crack’.  It’s not a beautiful accident – it’s poor making.  

    I feel at once full of hatred and joy.  Shame and excitement.  Disappointment and triumph.   Is this what making visual art is?  All art?  I remember the knot in my shoulders after listening to my first play read-through at RSC – it felt like the worst two hours of my life.  Even though everyone loved it and thought it went really well and my agent was crying.  (In a good way haha…)

    So.  

    I have things to play with, which is what I’m interested in anyway right?  Currently I have four different elements in my work which I could use – they don’t hang together in ay concievable coherent way.  In my opinion.  Right now. 

    The figures – some of them have an interesting quality.  Some are just ‘cute’.

    I have made lots of tiny orange chairs.  They have no visual or stylistic connection to the other bits.  Apart from municipal swimming pools.  They might be good to play with.  

    The parian figures that I had to try so hard to get fired – they need a slow ramp to temperature – but can be fired in one glaze fire no bisque.  They’re…just.  I don’t like them.  They feel like tests that I should have finished ages ago.  I think they’re not going to be any part of whatever happens next.

    Another thing I could do is take a hammer to the whole thing.  

    Gaby – who I wrote of earlier – is teaching throwing on Tuesday in the Ceramics Gallery / Studio I work in – I will ask her what she would do.  Gaby reassembles the detritus of kiln firings.  I notice a small part of this is me wanting Ceramicsworld to give me an acceptable answer.

    Anyway.  Off to work…

    …and in the afternoon my friend Trui Malten walks into the Gallery.  Trui is an extraordinarily smart and funny theatre lighting designer.  I showed her my pictures of the beautiful glaze and the big crack.  And my Fine Art insecurities.  And she says – 


    “What would theatre say?  Put it in the space.  See what it means”

    She says it’s right that the crack is like it is.  Accidents and change have always been part of my practice.  That’s actually what I’m writing about according to my Study Statement.    

    ‘My friend is a theatre designer who got so sick of the transient nature of theatre he had to become an architect’. Trui is really funny and really smart as I say. 

    Chance.  Is there if you are open to it.  It’s always there.  

    Today as working am only able to join Jonathan’s session during my lunch break and it’s about ‘Dérive’.  The Situationist’s idea of wandering, drifting, following one’s nose.  And it’s not just a creative whim – it’s anti-capitalist.  It’s as if not more urgent now as the world is imploding into mediocrity, fake news and identikit shopping centres.  Alongside the rise of structural disenfranchisement, extremist right-wing politics, extremist misogny etc etc etc etc etc.

    Suddenly talking to Trui a whole multi-disciplinary chain of connections opens up.

    Maybe if I was riffing on my thoughts today, the class that I was half in and out of, the surprise inspiration from Trui it might look something like this 

    • my work, acceptable or not to the ceramicist world, to the art world, what does Gaby think, what does Collect 2026 think, that will be positive inspiration at least, but also overwhelming, my class is exploring ‘dérive’ and following their noses, it’s different to not be in the class I miss it, oh Trui arrives, she’s not in Italy, she’s bringing cakes and I forgot to pack snacks, theatre sets get thrown in a skip what a waste, what’s sustainable, damaged creative ceramic children, ah once again theatre has the answers for me, break everything and start again, it will be ok, why am I making this work that looks like theatre sets, that’s not ceramic art, then a guy walks in to the Gallery, he really enjoyed Collect will I be going (yes), look out for his work, he’s from Nova Scotia, Trui and I google him, Neil Forrest, oh look his work looks like theatre sets, little figures, I love ceramics, I hate ceramics.

    My friend Niall Ashdown is maybe one of the best improvisors in the world.  We teach together sometimes.  He often says when people question the ‘rules of improv’ that he wants to get a t-shirt made that says – 


    The Opposite is Also True

  • 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’.