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Shattered |
The work of Claudia Clare is migratory: it crosses disciplines and it crosses frontiers. Her work has come to rest in ceramics, but it includes image-making and text, sound and film. It shadows her passionate interest in the real texture and detail of the stories of the women whose journeying she is recording in this exhibition. In this installation Claudia is making a claim for the capacity of ceramics to be much more than the passive recipient of decoration, the vessel acting as an inert ground on which ‘meaningful' imagery is placed. She is suggesting- with great conviction- that it is an art form, a material, capable of sustaining contemporary narratives of trafficking, violence and survival. Gauguin, frustrated by the prettiness of ceramics, wrote with anger that ceramics could be a ‘central art'. It is this sense of centrality, of bringing significant ideas, images and stories that have been on the margins into the centre, that fuels this work. This is not to suggest that narrative has no history in ceramics. There is a substantive range from the elaborate late Renaissance majolica dishes of Italy with their allegorical storytelling to the highly poeticised placing of text and image in the work of the Rimpa School of seventeenth century Kyoto . It is present in the Willow pattern of ubiquitous Staffordshire plates. Within contemporary practice the fiercely angry covered jars made in the 1960s by Michael Frimkess (Uncle Sam raining missiles down on Vietnam ) and the bleakly amused excoriations of Essex life by Grayson Perry are pre-eminent. But these examples tend towards the allegorical and the ironic: such distancing prisms cannot be used to tell these contemporary stories. Claudia's pots draw instead on the expressive drama inherent in the material, and on its connection to ancient civilisations, to attribute a cultural significance and weight to stories which otherwise get discarded as being simply part of the flotsam of difficult, or marginal lives . How we read ceramics is questioned: these vessels contain poetic fragments, partly effaced dialogues, transcripts from testimonies, neighbourly conversations. Some parts we can read, others we are aware of, and struggle for: it is a series of palimpsests, the sound of voices overheard in a mini cab. It is the same with the imagery- a welter of the closely observed and particular, and the clichéd and commodified. Unused to reading images and words in the same place on ceramic forms, unused to this tension between the harrowingly personal and the generalised we are drawn in and pushed away. This is heightened by the brokenness of the vessels. The broken pot is an image older than Job: the correspondence between the fragility of the person and the vessel is a deep one. Seeing these broken vessels we also see mended vessels, vessels that are not dispersed into fragments. In Claudia's installation we feel what Stephen Greenblatt called ‘resonance and wonder': the pull between the interrogative and the aesthetic. We feel the pressure between the hidden and the disclosed, the margins and the centre. Edmund de Waal
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