Visual art exhibitions and events with a platform for critical writing
Sainsbury Centre For Visual Arts, University Of East Anglia, Norwich
1 October – 8 December
Reviewed by: Natasha Soobramanien
'Slip' brings together work by nineteen well-established artists and designers who have undertaken residencies at the Netherlands' European Ceramic Work Centre (EKWC) over the past decade. For many of the artists, their residency with clay has brought them into contact with what, for them is a relatively new or unexplored material.
We are told that Anish Kapoor produced his work for the show in five days; I could tell. Some of the forms which comprise his Untitled, 1994, are barely forms at all – a ridge of ash-coloured clay bearing the imprint of frantic fingers or a terracotta lump from which emerges the perfectly rounded bottom of what might be a bowl in progress but I couldn't be sure – Kapoor leaves the rest of it to be shaped in the viewer's mind. In other pieces, his trademark saturated hues are used to stunning effect in seductive, sticky-looking glazes: an oozing gash or smooth, protruding dome of vibrant red. Kapoor makes a virtue of his relative lack of experience with the medium, approaching it instinctively. The results are urgent, powerful, sexually evocative works that are tempting to touch.
Tony Cragg is no stranger to clay, his mesmeric Shiva, 1998, delivers something delicate and considered. A stack of circular ceramic forms seem to mutate into an infinite coil as I walk around them – a still fluid arrangement in solid fired form. In Antony Gormley's View, 1985, a life-sized figure crouches on the floor peering into the open mouth of an outsized terracotta jar. Gormley identifies air as one of the integral materials used in making the piece; drawing our attention to the gaping mouth of the jar's empty void and also, by implication, to clay's close connection with the four essential elements: air, earth, fire and water.
Elsewhere, more unexpected materials are used in conjunction with ceramics including rubber, copper, cotton and plastic. Eichenberg and Bodewits' sinister instruments call to mind plumbing, surgical or laboratory equipment – meticulous and mysterious assemblages, these are tools with an unknown function.
One of the most intriguing works in the show comprises two oriental-style figurines; reminiscent of Chinese Jade ornaments, they are precious looking in all senses of the term. In the first of Heringa/Van Kalsbeek's figurines, a woman in classical Chinese dress stands serenely, apparently unaware of the lascivious snake-like tendrils creeping up on her from behind. These oriental flourishes – suggesting snakes, dragon tails or bamboo roots – threaten to engulf her. In the second, a similarly delicate figure stands, head bowed, in communion with a bush of white blossoms. These ceramic flowers are spiky like coral; again this seething organism seems on the verge of swallowing the woman whole, in an erotic, vegetable way.
The accompanying catalogue tells us that the exhibition title refers not only to the ceramists' binding and casting material but that inherent in the word slip are the ideas of blurred boundaries and the mixing of artistic disciplines. The word slip also carries connotations of mistakes and of insubstantial, hard-to-grasp objects. As an exhibition conceived to celebrate EKWC's tenth anniversary, much of the work here was never intended for wider exhibition. All produced in the exploratory atmosphere of EKWC's workshops, the collected works reveal processes and possibilities in clay; work in progress, technical developments and serendipitous slips of direction.
Writer detail:
NATASHA SOOBRANANIEN
is a writer based in Norwich.
Venue detail:
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