Contemporary British Ceramics and the Influence of Sculpture by Laura Gray

Author:Laura Gray
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Taylor & Francis (CAM)
Published: 2017-11-16T00:00:00+00:00

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On a larger scale you actually are much more aware of the violence of the image . . . On a smaller scale . . . You kind of get much more caught up in the actual beauty or what I feel is the beauty, the beauty of the dissolving of the object.11

Unlike Sublimation, in Fragments the teapot is seen broken and then whole again. The moment of climax, the emotion of the break, is momentary as the teapot is resurrected before our very eyes. The point of interest in this work lies not in the emotion of breaking a favourite object, but in its representation of the control of violence, and the transformation of casual destruction into something controlled and understated. Cushway has continued to bring together ordinary cheap ceramics, performance and destruction. At the 2011 British Ceramics Biennial he performed a work that involved trying to spin plates. Destruction, as well as performance, is perhaps a natural direction for an artist who in 2007 declared, ‘I really wanted to make nothing’.12

The aesthetic effect of the broken teacup, bowl or plate offers a point of exchange between ceramics and sculpture in which the current of influence between the two flows in both directions. The power of using ceramics lies in the human ability to invest and load inanimate things with great emotional or symbolic significance. As a consequence, domestic objects have a wide range of symbolic possibilities, especially around family relationships, and breaking domestic ceramics can (potentially) be understood as a destabilizing act that unsettles the familiar associations of the home. Disruption of normal patterns is a thought-provoking thread to look out for in works that involve the motif of destruction. In Fragments Cushway destabilizes the expectation that a potter should make tangible objects, while in his Exploded Artworks and Dead Nature series De Vries destabilizes our reverence of the historic.

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