Tag Archives: ceramics diploma

What now?

So here I am, final lecture over, New Designers exhibition done, boxes packed for our graduation show (which begins on Wednesday at Candid Arts in Islington), practically done and dusted and I find that I am lying awake at night with a serious case of pot anxiety.  This is ridiculous!  I have no projects to make for, I have the summer ahead of me to relax, think about the future and bask in the sun and I am worrying about what to make.

The thing is, that’s just it!  I have nothing to make for.  I am dreading losing my direction.  I need a project.  But it is no good simply setting one for myself, it has to have a purpose.  The great things about being on a course are that you have a clear direction and the camaraderie of like minded people with whom to share the experience.  We are about to scatter to the four winds and I am missing us already!

001
Long forgotten but full of potential for exploring.
005
Fully polished – looking fairly amazing!

I found a forgotten and unloved trial piece at the back of my shelf whilst I was tidying it this week.  I was half way to the dustbin with it when I realised that it just might be the impetus I need to get going post-diploma.  I am very aware that I have only touched the surface of so many interesting techniques in the past two years and that there are a great many which I have had to discard in recent months in order to come up with a coherent body of work for an exhibition.  But the work which I made for my final semester is not exactly who I am.  This is work in progress, it is only the beginning!  Now it is time to haul out my note books and reject pieces and juts play with them.  Something is going to lead somewhere and in the meantime there is so much to do – glazes to revisit, methods to explore and develop, processes to be integrated into ideas which have worked well but could go further.  When I review the span of time ahead it is actually very exciting.  There is so much to do and explore and this long lost reject is just the beginning . . . no time to sleep, better get making!

What Am I Missing?

Marcel Duchamp, The Bride Stripped Bare by her Bachelor's Even
Marcel Duchamp, The Bride Stripped Bare by her Bachelor’s Even

We had a lecture on Friday about Marcel Duchamp.  One of the images which we were shown was The Bride Stripped Bare By Her Bachelor’s Even.  It is an extraordinary piece!  In the top section is the Bride, her veil, which trails behind her, has 3 white, almost rectangular sections which were apparently formed by hanging sheets of paper in the breeze and copying the shadows that they formed.  Just below the veil, on the right are 9 holes which were created using a toy cannon.  I remember having great fun with such a cannon in my childhood.  They fired matchsticks and could fell a tin soldier at twenty paces!  Here they represent the sexual emissions of the nine Bachelors in the lower half of the work.

The Bachelors, nine Malic Moulds, represent nine rather emasculated men in the uniforms of, among others, a priest, a policemen, a cavalry officer and an undertaker.  Apparently the trajectory of their ejaculations was decided by copying the random patterns formed by dropping lengths of string onto a surface.

In the warmth of a darkened lecture room my mind wandered to the big question – Why?  I think I might have drifted off because, having done some research into the meanings of this piece this morning, I have discovered all kinds of interpretation of this work, including the following: http://cosmosfromchaosblog.blogspot.co.uk/2013/08/defying-gender-binary-comparative.html.  I suspect that, had I paid closer attention, I would have a clearer understanding of the answer.  Yet it seems to me that, even if I can be convinced that this is more than barely disguised pornography and that the significance of the Freudian theories which form the backbone of much Surrealist ideology are valid (big subject, might have to come back to this!), I have one over-riding concern which I have to voice:  Whilst the world is fascinated by work of this kind, however worthy, what have we missed?  Are there artists who were working in another, less shocking, genre at the same time but who for some reason lacked the oxygen of publicity. If you follow this train of thought, are there still artists of incredible calibre, working today, who go un-noticed because the press cannot say sufficiently disturbing things about them and so we never get to hear about them.  Whilst I have absolutely no intention of demeaning the work of artists  such as Tracey Emin, I do see a difficulty.  If we are so fixated in trying to understand  art that shocks do we risk failing to discover other, equally valid, technically skilful but less shocking work.  And, whilst I struggle to get my head around the thinly veiled pornography of Duchamp, however important its message, what have I missed?  images41P3MXYL