Charlotte Metcalf is the Editor of Great British Brands and the co-presenter of Break Out Culture, a weekly podcast with former Minister of Culture, Lord Vaizey. She is also a film-maker, author and journalist. Every week she’ll be reporting on cultural events, exhibitions, fairs and publications that are of interest to the communities of craftsmen we represent and celebrate, with a particular focus on goldsmiths and silversmiths.
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At London’s Hayward Gallery Strange Clay: Ceramics in Contemporary Art will run until 8th January. It’s the first ever large-scale group exhibition in the UK to explore how contemporary artists are using clay in inventive ways.
The exhibition has been curated by Dr. Cliff Lauson who has brought together 23 international and multi-generational artists. Dr. Lauson’s aim has been look at the way they’ve used innovative methods and techniques to push the medium to its physical and conceptual limits ‘to produce artworks that surprise and provoke in good measure.’
Thomas Lyte is a brand that built its own workshops to achieve those very aims, believing there should be no limits to creativity, and so harnessing traditional craftsmanship to cutting edge technology in order to achieve dazzling, often astonishing, works in silver and gold. It goes without saying that Thomas Lyte celebrates an exhibition like this that is using a very different medium to explores a similar spirit of pushing beyond creative and conceptual boundaries.
The artworks on display at the Hayward’s Strange Clay exhibition vary in scale, finish and technique, from big immersive installations to sculpture making use of found objects. They address a wide range of topics from architecture, social justice and politics to the body.
One brand new commission, titled Till Death Do Us Part by Lindsey Mendick, positions the domestic realm as a potential battleground and our homes as personal worlds that can be ‘microcosms of hell, bliss or loneliness’.
See David Zink Yi’s, Untitled (Architeuthis), a gigantic ceramic squid, a slithery-looking sprawling five metre mass lying in what looks like a pool of its own ink. It represents the artist’s fascination with the extreme biological differences between humans and squids.
There are examples of known, everyday objects being totally reimagined, like Takuro Kuwata’s huge, eye-catching, glazed organic forms which are reminiscent of monstrously misshapen, gigantic, brightly-coloured, sprinkled cupcakes, sprouting and thrusting up out of their paper cases. in fact, these are radical reinterpretations of Japanese tea bowls used in traditional ceremonies.
There’s also Klara Kristalova’s botanical installation that features strange, fantastical ceramic creatures emerging from moss, grass and branches to evoke the woodland setting for Swedish fairy tales.
The beauty of this exhibition, other than its power to surprise and delight, is that alongside experimental and innovative works by a new generation and ceramic pioneers like Betty Woodman, Beate Kuhn, Ron Nagle and Ken Price, there are also works by globally revered ceramic artists like Edmund De Waal and Grayson Perry. Grayson Perry’s Women of Ideas will delight fans while Edmund de Waal’s Atmosphere comprises an installation of nearly 300 porcelain vessels in nine suspended plexiglass vitrines – and his conversation with ceramicist Magdalene Odundo on Wednesday 16th this week is already sold out.
This exhibition takes the medium of clay way beyond the limits of the kiln, firing our imaginations as to what it can achieve and contributing to the ongoing and broadening dialogue between art and craft.
southbankcentre.co.uk/whats-on/art-exhibitions/strange-clay-ceramics-contemporary-art
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