From Clarke's Hide Wicken Fen June 2016 Helen Terry.jpg

Wicken Fen: a new project

June 19, 2016

I am very excited to be starting a new collaborative project with artist Sally Tyrie and on Friday we made an initial research visit to Wicken Fen. This is one of the National Trust’s oldest reserves (acquired in 1899) and one of the last remaining un-drained areas of the East Anglian fens. It is an exceptionally rich wetland habitat.

At this time of year, the dominant impression is greenness. The fen is a mass of tall sedges, grasses and reeds in brilliant emeralds and yellow greens, threaded through with traces of red and rust orange. Flashes of yellow, magenta, blue violet from the many marsh flowers – including orchids. It was gorgeous … but I am really looking forward to seeing the Fen in the winter when the green is bleached out and the underlying structures are exposed.

I’ve visited Wicken before but it was a long time ago and therefore it was like discovering the place afresh. There is that initial phase of orienting yourself within a place – finding your way around, noticing what you notice, what you choose to focus on. As ever, I was consistently drawn to details – marks and traces – reflections, linear marks, particularly of the reeds and sedges at the water’s edge.

But it’s interesting to experience a place with someone else – two pairs of eyes. Sally noticed things that I might have passed over – expanding my awareness, widening the range of things I noticed.

We were drawn to the hides – both the structures themselves and the experience of looking out of them. As well as the viewing hatches, many of them had random holes in the walls (Birds? Knot holes?). So there were lots of ways of looking out, looking through, peepholes, slits, cracks.

Worn and weathered plastic windows veiled and obscured the view – they simplified what you could see into shadowy outlines, veiling and obscuring as much as they revealed. –partial information, selective. My attention moved between the marks on the surface of the window itself and what you could see through it.

Marks on the surface and shadowy landscape beyond

(By the way my new “dream studio” is a wooden shed on stilts, with hatch windows and a good view … although maybe not for wet work.)

No preconceived ideas about what work might result but lots to think about. There will be more visits, visual research, drawing and thinking with a view to developing work for an exhibition sometime next year. So expect to be hearing more about the fens over coming months.

Visit Sally’s web site to see her work and follow her side of this collaboration.

Rafael Perez at Contemporary Ceramics May 2016 1

Rafael Pérez: looking for the unexpected

May 8, 2016

London was bathed in sunshine yesterday and I spent a fine, if tiring, day visiting galleries, bookshops and sitting in cafés.

Among other things I caught the final day of an exhibition of sculptures by Rafael Pérez at the Contemporary Ceramics Centre:

“The driving force behind Pérez’s work is surprise and curiosity. He sees ceramics as an art form that offers a labyrinth of possibilities with infinite variables, making a viewer find their way through his pieces to search and explore. In recent years, his work has been focused on the desire to distance himself from the final object, on leaving the “authorship” as a matter shared between the fire and himself. The surprise of ‘non recognition’ between an object that goes into, and then comes out of the kiln, this ‘seeing with new eyes’ (as if the work was done by someone else) is what interests Pérez.”

Contemporary Ceramics Centre

Pérez cuts and layers clays with different properties, such as white porcelain and black earthenware. Some of these clays expand during firing, allowing the object to swell in the kiln. Layers peel apart. Surfaces crack. Forms twist and tear. The resulting forms are reminiscent of obscure archaeological objects – twisted, eroded and encrusted until only a sense of the original form remains. The layers were like book pages or layers of cloth in the process of coming apart from having been coiled and wrapped around each other.

Pérez says that with years of experience he can often predict what will happen but that invariably it is still a surprise with every firing … and it is this element of the unexpected that inspires him.

“… the backbone of my work has always been research and experimentation … I constantly pursue any sign, accident or occurrence with more of a sense of fun than scientifically …”

“ … test pieces clutter up my walls and shelves … but it is out of all this bustling, chaotic activity that my work springs. I am particularly interested in the “other use” of techniques and materials, maybe doing something wrong so as to discover new paths. I love the search in its own right and especially getting results which seem “alien” to me“

Rafael Pérez in Exhibition catalogue

Rafael Pérez at Contemporary Ceramics May 2016

Unexpectedly, this was a theme for the day. Earlier I had been to a discussion between Helen Carnac, who works with metal and enamel, and bookbinder, Tracey Rowledge, at Contemporary Applied Arts on the theme of how they manage, harness and embody “mistakes” in their work.

In summary, while Carnac feels that her work is all about the accidental, chance marks –“mistakes” – and not quite knowing what will come out of the kiln; Rowledge described a more problematic relationship with “mistakes”. On the one hand, mistakes in the construction of a book binding are a “no”, because they undermine its integrity. But on the other, she talked about looking for the unknown, the unexpected, because if the work is always “perfect” and predictable, there is something uninteresting about that and, what is more, your work never moves on.

In my own case, I love the accidental, unexpected marks and finding ways to approach the work so that I have less control and there is room for these accidental, unintended consequences is inherently more interesting to me. That's not the same as being “sloppy” – it’s important that the work is well finished. It’s a balance between practicing the knowledge and skill built up over years of experiment and practice and leaving room for the materials and process themselves to affect the outcome in ways I can’t completely control nor predict.

Winter

December 14, 2014

I have been away for most of December. The studio is cold and littered with half-unpacked work and supplies from workshops I've been to. The most recent was one with Matthew Harris at the Committed to Cloth studio. The starting point was text - treating handwritten text as a form of drawing. We played with this until our drawings no longer resembled any intelligible writing. I had a lot of fun experimenting with three dimensional drawing using wire and torn shreds of cloth. I loved the shadows this cast on the wall or the table.

At one point Matthew warned us we should expect to feel a little lost as we began to experiment and move away from our starting points. This certainly proved to be true! That feeling of not knowing where you were, what you were doing or where things were going was unsettling. It was an interesting experience to be consciously aware that I was lost and observe myself trying to find my way again! The way my mind started searching for connections to things I already knew or ways of making what I was doing intelligible (to myself, that is). Which, of course, is how we learn. And if we never allow ourselves to get a little lost occasionally, we never move forward.

When I came home I started re-reading Rebecca Solnit's "A Field Guide to Getting Lost". She talks about how for artists "the unknown ... is what must be found" - it's where the work comes from. But I also recalled this point:

“Explorers ... “were always lost, because they’d never been to these places before. They never expected to know exactly where they were. Yet, at the same time, many of them knew their instruments pretty well and understood their trajectories within a reasonable degree of accuracy. In my opinion, their most important skill was simply a sense of optimism about surviving and finding their way.” ”

— Rebecca Solnit (quoting Aaron Sachs): "A Field Guide to Getting Lost", chapter 1

The willingness to explore and find new things requires a willingness to tolerate the sense of being lost. But some robust skills to build upon and having some sense of where you want to go can make the difference between just being helplessly confused and finding a way through - in artistic terms as much as in exploration.

Meanwhile, Winter arrived here at the beginning of December. The wind moved to the north and the temperature plummeted. The last leaves are clinging to otherwise bare trees. The first regular frosts have appeared - silvery edges to the leaves and frozen puddles. The sky has been a study in grey - sometimes stormy, sometimes like pearl - and occasionally pale, cold blue. Sometimes the only colours in the landscape are a myriad of different greys with a shot of brilliant green of moss on a wall or winter crops in the fields. Some people think this is a dull and dreary time of year but I love the colours and the way the landscape changes in winter. Everything is stripped to its bones and you can see the underlying structures of the trees and the land. All the lines are emphasised.

I've been in Norfolk for a week - long walks on the marshes, by the sea and across fields. Plenty of opportunity to appreciate the winter landscape.

Amazing light effects - low sun under a bank of cloud over the roadbeds at Cley

Twilight.  A very low tide in the Blakeney Channel (seen from the Morston side) made it look as though we could almost walk across to Blakeney Point. — Twilight. A very low tide in the Blakeney Channel (seen from the Morston side) made it look as though we could almost walk across to Blakeney Point.

Morston.  Low tide.  One of the landing jetties for the seal trip boats. — Morston. Low tide. One of the landing jetties for the seal trip boats.

Beautiful colours and lines - a decaying Gunnera leaf

Standing at the edge of understanding

February 5, 2014

“The feelings you get, that thinning out that comes from going into limbo, out to the edge of your understanding and stand there reaching, reaching into a thin layer of unknowns, stuff to swim through without body or substance, without breath, without substantiation or reassurance, never knowing where it leads or what it’s made of, or what it’ll be like, and you float and struggle and gasp, it brings nausea and fear, strange body functions and doubt - much doubt - it’s like falling but never arriving anywhere, never hitting anything unless it’s a new concept, just the fear of falling - but from this leap comes real creation, for when it finally arrives, when it lands, when it is grasped, gasped, inhaled, coaxed into existence, it’s the craziest, most wonderful thing in the world. It’s better than anything else. It’s like falling in love not gradually but in a single moment. It is that moment of the realisation of love, not where it leads or how long it’ll last or what it means, just the heart-beating, stomach sinking, painfully-grabbing moment of Yes! This is it - then it’s gone and one lives with the taste of it having been. You always have some end result, but it always needs to be renewed, refreshed, never having the same original freshness of the first moment, the first kiss of creating.”

— Agnes Denes

More about Agnes Denes here