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‘Part II: Ceramics – The Central Core’ explores the fantastical, mythological and performative elements of the medium. The malleability of clay allows it to perform under and for an artist’s hands, a physical, mysterious manifestation of an artist’s psyche and ideas. The second half of our two-part online exhibition for Women 2.1, showcases work by female artists not represented by the gallery, featuring Shary BOYLE, Judy CHICAGO, Karen DENSHAM, Lindsey MENDICK, and Holly STEVENSON.
The ceramic process has always contained an air of mystery and other-worldliness – as Jo Dahn describes: “to take earth and turn it into something that can be used and admired is the most fundamental kind of alchemy.”
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Shary BOYLE’s alchemy is to transform the figure, whether female, male or genderless, into an object of transfiguration. Her early training, in local community hobby classes run and attended by ‘grandmothers’, germinated her interest in the body. Inspired by Victorian figurine moulds, Boyle creates experimental, seductive forms which defy categorization. With Oasis (2019), the naked figure’s confident open pose reveals a brightly glazed penis emerging from flower petals, which rest on the vaginal lips, while with Inverted Fetish (2017), an upside down, impassive doll-like face becomes a plinth for the ascending female legs. -
Shary BOYLE
Oasis, 2019Porcelain, underglaze, china paint, gold and silver lustre50 x 42 x 24 cm -
'What art isn't decorative? What function does fine art serve? I ask to provoke deeper consideration of the implied value system in the distinction. Let's question who gets to distinguish 'meaning' and qualify ideas. Or determine when an object is 'only' something pretty to look at, or for ‘service’. Let’s look closely at who decides the terms of good art and bad art, for whose benefit.'
- Shary BOYLE, WHY I CREATE
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Judy CHICAGO’s Six Erotic Cookies (1967) is at odds with Boyle’s hyper-sexual figurines. An exceptionally early work by Chicago, made before she changed her name, the six “cookies” are placed in a domestic interior, enclosed within a glass cake stand and resting on a hand-painted plate, awaiting to be consumed. The banality of the cake stand is at odds with the six figures, each coupled in a sexual embrace – an oddity of juxtaposition that is further explored by Karen Densham.
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'Historically, women have either been excluded from the process of creating the definitions of what is considered art or allowed to participate only if we accept and work within existing mainstream designations. If women have no real role as women in the process of defining art, then we are essentially prevented from helping to shape cultural symbols.'
― Beyond the Flower: The Autobiography of a Feminist Artist -
Judy CHICAGO
Six Erotic Cookies (in 10 parts), 1967Sculpture: plastic bowl, glass and painted plaster
Two drawings: acrylic and ink on paper with wooden frameSculpture: 28.3 x 31.4 x 31.4 cm
Drawings: 35 x 35 cm each -
Karen DENSHAM’s Stork (2021), shrouded in a black hood, recalls to mind witches and Philip Guston’s hooded and masked figures (the subject of major controversy last year, as a result of Guston’s cancelled touring retrospective). Playing with iconography, Densham takes the stork – the child-bearing animal of fairytales – and makes it sinister, a hooded reference to the association of witchcraft with early midwifery, and simultaneously the shiny black lustre of oil spills which destroy avian habitats. With Yeti (2021), the monstrous creature of Himalayan folklore, Densham subverts the story: placing a found porcelain polar bear atop a furry white explorer’s boot, the cracked glaze alluding to melting ice and our own environmental ‘footprint’. Fairytales are nothing but stories, as Densham makes abundantly clear through her manipulation of scale, media, and environmental concerns.
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‘DENSHAM’S WORKS CANNOT BE REGARDED AS WHIMSICAL OR AS FLIGHTS OF FANCY. ON THE CONTRARY, THEY ARE ROOTED IN EVERYDAY LIFE, SOMETIMES IN ITS ACCIDENTLY COMICAL TAWDRINESS, SOMETIMES IN ITS TRAGICOMEDY OF HUMAN RELATIONS, AND SOMETIMES IN ITS ROUTINE HORRORS.’
- MATTHEW BOWMAN
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Lindsey MENDICK’s Bursting at the seams (2021) presents an unusual manifestation of a ‘pretty’ flower vase. Mendick’s version is more in keeping with scary stories, tales of Frankenstein and horror, with protruding eyes emerging from the vase’s bursting seams, crudely “stitched” together. Her autobiographical practice, incorporating memories and events from her own life defines her practice and here, she takes inspiration from one of her childhood favourite films, the 1993 Disney classic, Hocus Pocus, imitating the stylised stitching of the anthropomorphic Spellbook used in the film.
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Lindsey MENDICK
Bursting at the seams, 2021Glazed ceramic40 x 25 cm -
‘I quite often have this internalised fear of being exposed as a fraud when I think of how my work sits in relation to the history of ceramics. It’s definitely got worse as I have become more successful in my field and people’s expectation of the works have increased. I have become more unsure of myself, with intrusive and cruel thoughts creeping through the cracks in my ceramics and attacking my capability and successes. I think that due to the often critical and perfectionist nature of ceramics, this feeling can be magnified, as the work can receive criticality from both a craft and fine art background. There is this language to ceramics that even though I adore working in clay I just can’t permeate. I know a lot of artists who work in ceramics are interested in the craft and science of firings and glazings. But I’m not ashamed to say I’m not. I am happy with buying botz pots and throwing the glazes on without any idea of the outcome. I am not a ceramicist, I’m an artist.’
- Lindsey Mendick, On being honest and fragile, and her work - leaky and grotesque
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The amorphous, androgynous forms of Holly STEVENSON similarly play with myths and the fantastical, whether literally with Narcissus (2019), her daisy chain necklace-wearing phallic head form, which gazes wistfully down into an empty pool, or with Eunuch (2021), it’s two penile heads descending down into split legs which embrace an interior pool. The Eunuchs, historically castrated so that they could guard women’s quarters without fear of sexual frustration or temptation, are here rendered in playful, kitsch colours. They wear turquoise bowties and chain necklaces adorned with purple flowers, classically ‘feminine’ attributes. Stevenson’s sculptures are visual explorations of Freudian theories (narcissism, lactivism and castration anxiety), making visible the psychoanalyst’s often subversive ideas and reducing them to simple sculptural forms.
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'My practice is informed by psychoanalysis, feminism and fiction: I repetitively make and utilise two key forms in clay, the oval and the cylinder, which are inspired by Freud’s favourite seductive egg-shaped jadeite ashtray. This can still be found equipped with a phallic cigar on his desk at the eponymous museum in Hampstead: The resulting ceramic sculptures are often described as uncanny because of their ability to allow the viewer to recognise the object/subject but a formal lack of mimesis actively creates intrigue.'
- Holly Stevenson
Part II
Past viewing_room
