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.
Alex Murdoch, Artist 