From West to East
Malone tells Anjuli Bhargava that it’s India’s turn to shine in the international ceramic art arena
Her 2,000th piece sold for $35,000. That and some more from her own pocket proved enough to finance Kate Malone and her team of seven to head to Jaipur for the first ceramic art triennale in India. Malone’s decorative art pieces are sold exclusively by her dealer of 23 years, Adrian Sassoon, one of the UK’s best-known contemporary art and antique French porcelain dealer, at the best art shows around the world.
Malone and I meet on her last day at the triennale at the Quaint Café in Jaipur’s Jawahar Kala Kendra. She’s just finished her workshop with 60 school children and is packing up to leave after a three-week trip to India with her team.
She says she has been to many exotic places all over the world, most often without her team. This time she brought them along as a sort of special treat. So while the Akshara Foundation had offered to pay for her trip, she decided instead to sell her piece, the KM2000, and use the proceeds to finance her and the team’s trip.
We order two vegetarian salads and two juices from the menu written in chalk on the wall. The café is cheerful with an arty, bohemian feel, pretty much what one would expect in a space that promotes the arts.
A Royal College of Art, London, graduate, Malone begins by explaining the three main facets of her work. One is the lavish, indulgent and expressive decorative art that is sold at the most exclusive art fairs by Sassoon. A piece can take up to 200 hours to produce and can sell for anywhere between £10,000 and £100,000. The proceeds allow her to do less remunerative but equally important work.
Her second area of work is art installations at public places — hospitals, schools, public parks, libraries and so on. She collaborates with leading architects, projects typically run for two/three years and often run into a few million pounds. She’s recently worked on a £1.5 million project, where she created 10,000 hand-glazed tiles for the outer façade of 24, Savile Row in London’s Mayfair, a work that has been nominated for several awards.
A third area is her research on ceramic glazes. She has the biggest glaze archive and recipes for glazes in the UK. This aspect is more for her own interest, knowledge and to hone her expertise while her team members also learn from it.
Small is beautiful is Malone’s mantra. While she grew as an artist, Malone kept her spaces small. Soon after college, she began operating from a tiny space, a free studio in a railway arch in Central London given by the government.
Even after she achieved some success, she worked from a small studio in her house in Central London. For a few years, she operated from a cave in Provence, South of France, while her daughter studied in a medieval school in the village and then a small studio in Barcelona. Her current studio is also a small one and clients often ask where her “headquarters” are, only to discover they are right there. To keep overheads low and headaches minimum, Malone hires larger spaces when she has bigger projects to execute. It is only now — as she turns 60 — that she will finally have a large space at their new country house in Kent.
Malone also works closely with budding artists and interns as a career mentor of sorts. Even in the UK, becoming a successful artist can be a long struggle. She herself struggled for eight years before she reached some degree of success. Over the years, Malone has worked with a few hundred young artists and interns and typically has 8-12 young artists working with her at any given time. At present there are 11, who work with her two times a week, for seven-eight years before they branch out. She says her philosophy is not to take the “whole” of the person. She expects quality, integrity and skill and allows them to earn some money while learning from her so that they can develop their own work. Her aim is that all of them should eventually branch out, set up their own studios and be known in their own right. She offers the ones she can trust assignments she herself can’t manage due to shortage of time. That allows them to start out as micro enterprises.
Our salads arrive and look pretty good. Hers in particular, I note, is a vivid array of colours and looks strangely like a piece of art.
From a middle class family, Malone found her love for pottery at the age of 12 more by chance than any kind of design. It wasn’t as if art was part of her growing up years. In fact, she says, for years after she began as an amateur potter, her brothers would teasingly ask her when she was going to get a “proper job”.
She was introduced to ceramic art and pottery at her large government school. “We had fabulous teachers and the government was willing to provide resources back then,” she adds. It helped her find her passion, something that defines her today. The government had the foresight to have metalwork, woodwork, pottery, cooking, sewing, baking as part of the national curriculum and provided the necessary resources.
What is worrying Malone the most is how the UK government is focusing less and less on the arts and such skills. Budgets are being cut across schools and colleges. Back in the 1980s, more than 50 bachelors courses in ceramic arts were offered in the UK. Today, it is down to two. Her concern is that if the government continues to squeeze the arts, children will no longer get such exposure and eventually the arts and these skills will die out.
It is primarily for this reason that Malone decided to appear on the BBC2 show, The Great Pottery Throw Down for almost two years. Although it took up a fair amount of her time and state television doesn’t pay much, she wanted to do it so that the government wakes up and stops cutting art budgets in schools and colleges. She says that shows on baking or sewing have often led to a resurgence of interest and appreciation for these dying skills. She feels the arts are on the decline in countries like the UK whereas here in India, it is otherwise. “It’s your time. It’s India’s time,” she suddenly says, looking up at me. Be it the Kochi art biennale or the Jaipur triennale, India, she feels, is at the cusp of discovering its creative self. She says she’s “blown away” by the sophistication and energy she sees in what the Indian artists have displayed at the Jawahar Kala Kendra. Malone, who has visited India over 25 times and seen where Indian ceramic art was roughly two decades ago, can see the giant leap. The show is “fabulously curated” and is as imaginative and expressive as it can be. She argues that it has shown that “ceramic art in India has come into its own” and need no longer be clubbed with paintings or traditional art. In general, she thinks “India is a country on the move”, as evident in the sheer number of visitors at monuments and heritage sites around the country today, places she found almost deserted two decades ago. The rising middle class is discovering its own country like never before.
When she’s not producing a work of art, she and her husband — “an intrepid traveller” — are travelling, saying that it’s easier for her to list where she hasn’t been. China is one. As we chat, I am amazed at Malone’s deep knowledge of India’s palaces, temples, forts and rich heritage. She’s stayed several times at places I haven’t even heard of and this is my country we’re discussing. So much of India is ingrained in her husband and her that their only child carries “Ooty” as one of her names — Scarlett Ooty Engelfield Malone.
As our lunch draws to an end, she takes me to the studio to meet her team. With evident pride she introduces me to one of her team members, adding that she’s now becoming well known in the UK on her own steam. Evidently, her commitment to ceramic art goes well beyond her own work and that could be the secret ingredient of her success.