A timely celebration of ‘wheel’ art
The Studio and the Sea / Jessica Warboys
The digital revolution has made us crave authenticity. When everything is reduced to anonymous, characterless electronic “information”, we yearn for physical and emotional substance: the crackle of good old vinyl records, the live interaction of proper theatre, the atavistic sugar orgy of baking. Now it’s the turn of the messiest, clunkiest and most terminally unhip of all art forms: pottery. From The
Great Pottery Throw Down to cool young clay-slingers in trendiest east London, “everybody” is suddenly talking about arcane “slips” (that’s glazes to you) and the finer points of wheel technique.
This timely show on the interaction of art and ceramics couldn’t have a more appropriate location: the town that has been the spiritual home of British studio (handmade) pottery since the groundbreaking ceramicist Bernard Leach moved here in 1920.
Reacting against mass production, and looking to both oriental and British folk traditions, Leach had already evolved his signature style, with its earthy glazes and organic forms, before he arrived in Cornwall. Yet we’ve come to associate the whole feel of Leach’s art – and it very much is art as well as craft – with the proximity of the sea, the textures of stone, sand and foam, and of course the Cornish light that inspired the other St Ives artists, from Barbara Hepworth to Peter Lanyon, with whom Leach was closely associated.
The show starts with a superb array of pots by Leach and his associates. Works made during his training in Japan, all very oriental in appearance, contrast with pieces from his St Ives period that look to medieval English ceramics for inspiration – such as a magnificent charger hand-painted with a mythical beast and criss-cross patterns in brownon-yellow slip. Works by students show how his signature techniques were developed to levels almost higher than those of the master himself, including a “wide-bellied bottle” – a term that hardly does justice to its marvellously suggestive, swelling form – splashed with rust-coloured manganese, by Katharine Pleydell-Bouverie.
Yet if Leach’s aesthetic is timelessly satisfying and coherent, it didn’t develop: you’ll still find excellent craftspeople all over Britain using the same forms and glazes, in shades of brown, grey and oatmeal that can feel a little stifling. But as we enter the second of the show’s ocean-side pottery scenes – Venice Beach, California in the jazz and Beat Generation Fifties – it’s as though everything’s been turned to Technicolor.
Maverick potter Peter Voulkos created a “clay revolution” by tearing his wheel-thrown pots into slabs and constructing improvised sculptures: a kind of abstract expressionist pottery, equivalent to Pollock and Rothko’s experiments in painting. The two examples here appear to be provocative mash-ups of Leach – or perhaps that should be smash-ups. A huge lop-sided platter looks like it’s had pebbles shot into it from a gun, while a large dish has been shattered, crudely reassembled and re-fired. I’d love to see what The Great Pottery
Throw Down judges made of that. Ken Price, a student of Voulkos’s, experimented with psychedelic colours and jolting contrasts between organic and synthetic texture; his work is represented by a range of goofily garish pots inspired by Mexican tourist pottery, and cubistic cups and saucers that look hard to pick up, let alone drink out of. There’s the sense of fascinating and important developments here that the exhibition doesn’t have space to explore in proper depth.
Aaron Angell, the enfant terrible of the current British ceramics renaissance, presents a roomful of wildly quirky pieces produced by artists working in his Troy Town Art Pottery in east London, alongside works by older artists such as Hubert Dalwood and Barry Flanagan, and various ancient artefacts. The ease with which these apparently incompatible objects hang together – from ceramic platform boots by Turner Prize-shortlisted artist Anthea Hamilton to a strangely Picassoesque medieval roof finial – makes you wonder whether Angell and his friends are looking knowingly back to artists of the Sixties and Seventies and far beyond, or if there’s something about pottery itself that makes things look strangely timeless.
But as you move into the gallery’s central Atlantic-facing rotunda, this rather oddly conceived celebration of “the ceramics studio, the ocean and the landscape” starts to come unstuck, with a second part of the exhibition that feels like a different show altogether: long canvases hanging from floor to ceiling by the 38-year-old British artist Jessica Warboys.
Ever since it opened in 1993, Tate St Ives has been beset by a conflict of interest, between showcasing the art for which St Ives is famous – by Hepworth, Nicholson, Leach et al – and providing a springboard for cutting-edge art. What we have here is a misfiring compromise, with two very different shows brought together somewhat confusingly under the title The Studio and the Sea. On the one hand, we have a really engaging but painfully truncated exhibition on a subject of huge current interest; on the other, a show by a relatively unknown name which, while not without interest, has been given too much of the gallery’s best space.
Warboys’s strongest works are the paintings facing the sea in the rotunda, created by impregnating canvases with raw pigment, dangling them in the sea and letting the buffeting of the waves do the actual painting. There’s a raw, elemental feel to these accidental abstracts, a sense of the raking motion of the deep. The rest of her work – a collection of rather half-baked films on mythological themes and attendant props – I could have lived without.
There’s a conflict here between different kinds of “authenticity” – between Warboys’s essentially conceptual approach, and the young potters who, while just as cutting-edge in their way, represent a resurgent physical, craft-based attitude.
Tate St Ives’s long awaited extension, due to open in October, is designed to avoid just this kind of dilemma: to provide plenty of space for art of all kinds, which will please both the gallery’s curators and the public. Yet I have a feeling that debates about the proper use of this gallery will run and run.
Cool young clay-slingers provide physical and emotional substance in an age of digital revolution
Until Sept 3. Tickets: 01736 796226; tate.org.uk