Where do you stand in relation to your practice; are you a modernist or a postmodernist? This is a question that I have been taking on board as part of the theoretical side of my course. I’m postmodern in the sense that I feel postmodernism has broken down a lot of boundaries that have only in recent history existed between craft and fine art and in relation to the materials that artists use. It’s encouraged us to examine meta-narratives such as the art historical canon and to think about who is speaking and what their agenda.
I feel that there is a lot of opportunity for artists for whom ceramics forms an important part of their practice to write about their practice. There is a general lack of good critical writing within the field, obviously this has improved a lot within recent years. Artists like Clare Twomey and Edmund De Wall write very well about ceramics practice. Indeed, this has been very beneficial to their careers because they have been able to apeak about their work with a great deal of authority because of their engagement with the written word. Many ceramicists seem to think that they don’t need to write about their practice, that it speaks for itself. However these are the very people who then complain about a lack of critical writing in the subject or feel marginalised because their views aren’t represented.
http://www.craftscouncil.org.uk/crafts-magazine/bl…
Trying to figure out where your work fits in, where it should be shown and who your contemporaries are can be minefield of confusion! I’ve decided to continue with what I’m doing for now and worry about all of this at a later stage when my work is more developed. Maybe there won’t be a neat category that my work will fit into, and does this matter?
I’ve been exploring drawing through my work on paper, on clay, and also through reading critical writing about drawing. There has been some really beautiful writing about drawing in the introduction to the book ‘Vitamin D: New Perspectives in Drawing’:
“Drawing offers us the most extraordinary range of possibilities: it is a map of time recording the actions of the maker. It is as Michael Newman writes a record of ‘lived temporality’, and in the sense that a drawing is by essence always incomplete. A line always suggests a continuation and infinitum and thus connects us with infinity and eternity. A drawing enjoys a direct link with thought and with an idea itself. It’s very nature is unstable, balanced equally between pure abstraction and representation.” (Emma Dexter, p. 10)
This extract expresses a lot of ideas that I have concerning both drawing and sculpture albeit in a more considered way. Drawing is a very pure form of expression and perhaps this is why when I’ve chosen to work with ceramics I’ve used a black and white palette in order to exploit this pure quality.
