Showing posts with label Ceramic Artists History. Show all posts

Friday, September 2, 2022

Dan Elborne, Visual Artist, Australian

Deathgate is a ceramic installation artwork comprising 1.3 million handmade pieces, each representing one person detained in the Auschwitz network of concentration camps.

Pinched clay, variable large-scale dimensions, 2015-2018.

Principally, the time and labour involved in producing this work is where its conceptual basis lies. The objects have been created in comparative reference to the stones that cover and surround the railway, which was used as the main mode of prisoner transportation into the Auschwitz II (Birkenau) extermination camp. Utilising a wide range of clay types and a process completely reliant on the hands of the artist; I have produced each ceramic ‘stone’ to feature a fingerprint: an index of human interaction. This is intended as both a reductive exercise in considering the treatment of those victimised, but also as a way to create retrospective evidence. This evidence demonstrates that beyond the surface of largely incomprehensible statistics, is the reality of lived and felt human history.

The work is presented as two separate beds of ceramic ‘stones’. One bed contains 1.1 million pieces, and the other; 200,000 pieces. This gives a direct visual reference to the number of deaths (1.1 million) compared with those who survived the Auschwitz camps (200,000).

Aesthetically, the installation is reminiscent of the railway leading through the main entrance of Auschwitz II, also known as 'the death gate’. Various elements of the work, including the colour ratio of chosen clay types and the size of the ceramic ‘stones’ directly respond to personal impressions and reference images taken while visiting the Auschwitz camps in January 2016. In no way does the work aim to wholly represent what was experienced by those victimised, but instead, references the history from an overarching and reflective standpoint. It is by attempting representation that I wish to invoke an imaginative sense of totality.

Alongside the reference to a railway line, the objects I have created acknowledge a Jewish tradition that involves placing stones on grave-sites. This practice has been interpreted in various ways but is commonly considered as a way to honour those lost. This is through an object which, unlike flowers that wither and die, encourages the metaphorical idea of permanence as it applies to remembering.

On June 28, 2015, I began developing this project and produced the first ceramic ‘stone’. This determined the completion date for Deathgate to be on November 21, 2018. Totalling 1,242 days or 3 years, 4 months and 24 days, the start-to-finish production of Deathgate directly corresponds with the mass killing of prisoners in the Auschwitz network of camps, where the first large-scale gassing of prisoners occurred on September 3, 1941, and ensued in various forms until the liberation of Auschwitz on January 27, 1945.

I intend for the work to not just reference those detained in the Auschwitz camps, but to be considered as a relative fraction of the total amount of Holocaust victims (6 million). The work aims to memorialise this unconscionable event while questioning the role of art in remembering such history. More broadly, the work speaks of abhorrence and the ongoing nature of prejudice, discrimination and genocide. If anything, the crucial intent of the work is for it to act as a contemplative agent and an exercise in empathy, both for myself and viewers alike.

An digital version of the self-published catalogue for this artwork can be viewed here, which includes process and original reference photographs, an essay by artist, art critic and theorist Sandy Pottinger and a foreword by Dr Lachlan Malone.

Artist Website:

https://danelborne.studio/selectedwork

Jacqueline Bishop, Artist Explores History of Fine China Plates

Images of plates copyright Jenny Harper

Article credit to Serena Fokscchaner, September 10, 2021

Source:

https://www.ft.com/content/51936c59-d58b-4aa4-a036-0353e69536f0?fbclid=IwAR0zVXMgUaSyc0-OPPRvA2OAujMC7S6ajvTjfQRSN5QGH5k6IrHPd3M2J_I

Indelicate truths — an artist’s depiction of slavery on fine china

When Jacqueline Bishop looks back to her childhood in 1970s Jamaica, one image springs to mind. For an imaginative child, her grandmother’s china cabinet exerted a particular fascination. Behind its glass doors lay another world. The gold-rimmed porcelain plates with images of carriages, castles and waltzing couples offered glimpses of an exotic, faraway Europe.

Today Bishop, a writer, artist and academic, has a different perspective. While recently researching the history of her grandmother’s collection she uncovered uncomfortable facts. “In the 18th century, fine china was made for the luxury market. That prompted the question: where did its consumers get their money?” In many instances, “it came from sugar and the plantations worked by slaves”, says Bishop, a professor of liberal studies at New York University.

“This was a time when Londoners aspired to be as rich as a West Indian planter. [Alderman] William Beckford — whose wealth came from his Jamaican plantations — twice held the office of Lord Mayor of London,” says Bishop, who undertook her research in Britain. “The French, British, Dutch and Spanish families who for many centuries governed the Caribbean are all in one way or another, implicated in — and benefited from — slavery.” The royal families of those countries often featured on the plates, she says.

To reveal the truth behind her family’s pottery, Bishop designed an alternative dinner service. For this month’s British Ceramics Biennial in Stoke-on-Trent she has produced 18 plates that depict the history of Caribbean enslavement by “reversing the narrative”. Stark images of hangings or auctions are juxtaposed with vibrant flora and fauna. The results, while printed on delicate Staffordshire porcelain, are shocking.

“I wanted my dishes to be as appealing as conventional china, even though their history is difficult. My grandmother’s plates gave her a great deal of pleasure. For her generation they were some of the finest things you had in your home. I’d be lying to you if I didn’t say that I also love those ceramics,” she says.

A catalyst for the project was the discovery of 19th-century postcards brought back from Jamaica as souvenirs by visitors. Artists such as the French engraver, lithographer and printer Adolphe Duperly, who established his photography studio on the island in the 1830s, depicted a tropical Arcadia of lush vegetation and “picturesque” inhabitants.

“The postcards presented a particular view of the island. They were painted to lure others to come to Jamaica while obscuring the truth. I wanted my plates to tell a different story,” says Bishop.

She drew on historical images: illustrations, paintings and watercolours found online were cut out to make collages which were then digitally tweaked before being printed on to the unglazed pottery. The effect replicates transfer printing, a mechanical method of decoration using copperplate engravings developed during the 1750s in Stoke-on-Trent, hub of Britain’s ceramics industry, where Bishop’s plates were made.

A photograph of sugar cane cutters in Jamaica, c1905, Adolphe Duperly & Sons

In the 18th century, the Staffordshire “Potteries” or “Six Towns”, (Burslem, Fenton, Hanley, Longton, Stoke and Tunstall, which now make up the city of Stoke-on-Trent), also produced one of slavery’s most prominent opponents. Sir Josiah Wedgwood could have chosen to obey market forces “and run with the money”, says Bishop. Instead, the potter became an abolitionist.

In 1787 he designed a medallion in which a chained slave is accompanied by the inscription: “Am I not a man and a brother?” Thousands of these protest cameos were distributed for free at meetings. A batch was even sent to Benjamin Franklin.

The horrors of slavery are brought to life on Bishop’s ceramics. One plate depicts a flogging, another the branding of a slave. From the next, a woman gazes out, her neck clamped in an iron brace, a mask strapped across her mouth. Instead of carriages and castles, we see man’s cruelty. Bishop does not spare us the details. Women dominate the vignettes. Subjected to beatings and rape, female slaves suffered greatly at the hands of their owners. Bishop also emphasises their grace and fortitude. At a slave auction, a mother and daughter are clasped in a farewell embrace before being sold. “White artists often eroticised black women. They failed to convey their essential femininity,” says Bishop, whose most recent book is Gift of Music and Song: Interviews with Jamaican Women Writers.

“I wanted to render their beauty, however horrible their circumstances.” There is beauty too in the violet-blue lignum vitae or scarlet hibiscus flowers that frame the figures: a contrast to the cruelty.

Bishop chose these vibrant motifs for their historical significance. Jamaica’s national emblem, the hummingbird, was catnip to white hunters who displayed their exotic, taxidermied trophies in cabinets. Orchids were sought by plant hunters to be cultivated in hothouses as emblems of wealth.

Bishop learnt about her family’s history of slavery from her great-grandfather, a farmer of Scottish-Irish descent. “He’d take me on walks in the countryside and tell me stories. He believed in a world you could not see. He brought my ancestral world vividly alive.”

Jacqueline Bishop, writer, artist and academic: ‘I wanted my dishes to be as appealing as conventional china, even though their history is difficult’ © Jermaine Dawkins

Until their emancipation in 1838, Jamaican slaves grew their own food on often meagre provision plots. Surplus was sold via the market woman — a colourful figure in Bishop’s pottery — balancing a tray of produce on her head, a child strapped to her back. “The market woman is a constant in Jamaican society. By selling produce she laid the foundation for the peasantry after emancipation,” says Bishop, whose great-grandmother was a market woman. “Inevitably, she wanted something different for her children.” Bishop was the first in her family to go to university.

At the biennial her dinnerware will be shown in antique cabinets made from mahogany in a former 19th-century warehouse. Bishop hopes they will entice visitors to look again: “Slavery is a fraught subject. But if we confront history squarely in the face we can all learn and start to move forwards. I hope my plates will be part of that process.”

“History at the Dinner Table”, part of British Ceramics Biennial, September 11-October 7; britishceramicsbiennial.com

Follow @FTProperty on Twitter or @ft_houseandhome on Instagram to find out about our latest stories first

Raven Halfmoon, Ceramic Artist, United States

Raven Halfmoon (Caddo Nation) is from Norman, Oklahoma. She attended the University of Arkansas where she earned a double Bachelors Degree in ceramics/painting and cultural anthropology. Her work has been featured in multiple exhibitions throughout the U.S. as well as internationally. Raven is currently based in Helena, MT where she is a artist in residence at the Archie Bray Foundation for Ceramic Arts. She is represented by Kouri + Corrao Gallery in Santa Fe, NM.

More to see on artist website:

http://www.ravenhalfmoon.com/