Katherine Blain
My primary interests lie in exploring the intimate relationships that Ceramists have with clay.
Clay appeares passive, offering little or no resistance to our intrustions. It lavishes in being twiddled and rubbed. Shiny surfaces glow with excitment. The malleable material is readily accepted into close subjective spaces, as we uninhibitedly project our fantasies onto it, anticipating lasting relationships. It responds to our touching by holding traces of these events. The end product : a representation of the bonding, encases our most telling tales. Moments of complete and utter trust.
Clay has the ability to mimick certain traits that are characteristic of other materials. It is accepted not as a substitute, but as a replacement. Affinitive relationships are built on chosen characteristics that have appealled to our senses. Compositions are limitless, and infinite options are available to the Ceramist, offering a new experience with each encounter. Freud and Stokes, amongst others, suggested that an Artist's need to respond to tactile materials lies deep in the subconscious and can be traced back to childhood.
Paul Gauguin proclaimed himself the first Ceramic-Artist, and that his affintity with clay came from a childhood surrounded by his mother's collection of Peruvian pots. Bernard Leach recalled his youth in Singapore, and the action and imaginary interaction of playing with worm casts before they could harden. More recently Ceramists, such as Lawson Oyekan, have been producing work that brings their national and instinctual identity to the fore. While others, such as Grayson Ferry, fetishise their relationships with clay. Speaking personally, I retreated to the bottom of the garden, where in the dry African heat I made mud-pies with my little watering-can.
I have a passion for squeezing, squelching and slopping clay. My pieces are imbued with imagery from my past : both distant and near. The structures are influenced by English medieval buildings : showing strength and durability despite fragility. Occassional impressions reveal history. Surface patterns come from a vast range of sources that I have encountered throughout life :tomb paintings, massonic and universal symbols. Internal paintings is deeply personal and based on sensation. My work is constructed quickly, in a bid to hold in freshness. I am told the wobbly bits have a quality of immediacy which reflects my impatient nature: an eagerness to retu m to the material and a desire to reinvestigate the relationship.
Whether it is to continue a fantasy or to explore a different approach, the attraction to clay is as strong as when it was first encountered. The compulsion is propelled by additional qualities invested as the relationship progresses. Fissile reactions held within the impressionable bodies of clay clearly reflect the ceramist's state of mind. Tensions lead to ecstatic visionary trances that carry dreams, a lapse of time while dreams are transfixed into matter. There is a desire to be compelled...
Return often and take me,
beloved sensation, return and take me -
when the memory of the body awakens,
and old desire again runs through the blood,
when the lips and the skin remember,
and the hands feel as if they touch again.
Return often and take me at night,
when the lips and the skin remember...
C. P. Cavafy
