Ashley Thorpe - Contemporary British Ceramics: Beneath the Surface

CONTEMPORARY
BRITISH CERAMICS

beneath the surface

Merced, California, Pam Su, 2018.

CONTEMPORARY
BRITISH CERAMICS

beneath the surface

Ashley Thorpe

First published in 2021 by
The Crowood Press Ltd
Ramsbury, Marlborough
Wiltshire SN8 2HR

www.crowood.com

This e-book first published in 2021

Ashley Thorpe 2021

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British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
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ISBN 978 1 78500 889 4

Cover design: Kelly-Anne Levey

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Introduction

The Collectors Eye

I have called this introduction The Collectors Eye in response to The Makers Eye, a Crafts Council exhibition consisting of some 500 objects textiles, ceramics, paintings, wood, metal and glass chosen by fourteen craftspeople, held in London in 1982. In the year before the exhibition opened to the public, the Crafts Council published an accompanying catalogue. Selectors were arranged in the volume alphabetically by surname, and essays by two ceramicists with seemingly antithetical views were serendipitously placed next to each other. In the first essay, Alison Britton noted how her selection of works moved beyond utility. She observed how each object gave more than was asked of it, offered reflections on ideology as much as function, and existed in a space somewhere between craft and art. In contrast, in the second essay Michael Cardew asserted functionality as key for the consideration of ceramics as craft, a term he felt needed to be defended from the emergence of a new hierarchy that prioritized ceramics as fine art.

Grayson Perry, Searching for Authenticity (2018).

( Grayson Perry. Courtesy the artist and Victoria Miro)

My relationship with ceramic practice rests entirely on the fact that I am a collector rather than a maker. Looking back at The Makers Eye catalogue exactly forty years after its publication, I am struck at how much has changed, and how much seems to have stayed the same. In some ways, ceramics as a discipline seems more at ease with itself. The impassioned debates about whether ceramics can or should be art have perhaps been settled. Ceramics is an incredibly varied set of practices and ideologies, which includes anything from the most unpretentiously utilitarian bowl through to the most recent developments in fine art sculpture and site-specific performance. The British Ceramics Biennial, launched in 2009, has showcased the array of approaches that exist, and offered a platform of encouragement for recent graduates and established talent alike. Commercial galleries have focused on specific but varied types of work: some showcase more functional ware, others ceramic art and sculpture, and a handful of others exhibit both. Some artists exhibit with craft shops, others with fine art galleries.

Many collectors embrace this range of possibility. Others, I have observed, are much more resistant to it. Pots are an easier sell, and they certainly command the highest prices at auction. Names such as Hans Coper (192081), Lucie Rie (1902 95), Edmund de Waal, Jennifer Lee and Grayson Perry all achieve the eye-watering prices previously reserved for oil paintings and bronze sculpture (in 2018, a Coper vase sold for 318,000). Perhaps people know where they are with a pot; the familiarity of containment, however nominal, is reassuring.

If we look elsewhere, such as in the US, we find a much longer tradition of abstract and sculptural ceramics, and where such work is more readily regarded as contemporary art. In the mid-1950s, whilst Rie and Coper were crafting tea and coffee sets in Albion Mews, Peter Voulkos (19242002) was already working with the likes of John Mason (1927 2019) and Ken Price (19352012). These artists were pivotal in redefining what ceramic as a material could do. Utilizing techniques derived from Modernist, Abstract and Expressionist art, they successfully freed clay from its associations with domestic utility. The exhibition The Ceramic Presence in Modern Art, held at Yale University Art Gallery in 2015, demonstrated how these artists were deeply integrated with the wider milieu of the American avant-garde. In the US in the 1950s, fine and ceramic art circles were conjoined, and larger works by these artists now command tens of thousands of dollars at auction.

The 2015 Yale exhibition also included work by Rie and Coper. In discussions of line, volume and tone, it can be argued that some of their output contributed to a shift in ceramic practice in the US, and the UK, though in the latter perhaps as much, if not more, through their teaching. And that is, quite simply, because they were not. At least, not until the late 1980s and early 1990s, by which point Coper had died. Is this a problem? Yes and no. Pottery is not a dirty word. Though I sometimes wonder whether British ceramic artists who do not make pots are overlooked for doing so, whilst also being snubbed by fine art galleries for using (what some art collectors might perceive as) a craft material. Things are changing, but progress seems to me to be slow. Why?

There are undoubtedly many nuanced and complex reasons as to why the US and UK should have different aesthetic emphases. We could look, for example, to the different socio-economic and cultural impacts of the Second World War. We could recognize the legacy of mass-produced tableware in cities such as Stoke-on-Trent for framing expectations around ceramic practice as essentially vessel based. We might also look at the pervasive influence of Bernard Leach (18871979), and his belief that the Anglo-Oriental approach was the way to unify utility with art. We could explore the impact of Leachs criticism of artists such as William Newland (191988) and James Tower (191988) who, by making work influenced by Pablo Picasso in the 1950s, were derogatorily termed the Picassettes, further cementing a divide between fine art and craft art. We could consider the status of Rie and Coper as immigrants, and the fact that they initially had to situate their modernism within the prevailing Leach aesthetic. There is also the role of government institutions in promoting certain ideologies around craft, and the significance of museum acquisition policies privileging certain practices over others. All of this, and undoubtedly a great deal more, has played a part.