Alex Murdoch, Artist

Process

  • Why should we care?

    Things are sort of joining up with my theatre practice.  This is my third tutorial with Jonathan.

    I’ve been compartmentalising the two things which makes no sense.  I talk to Jonathan about the themes in my recent blogs – looking more closely at my theatre making influences. 

    I also enjoyed writing in the Rebecca Fortnum class.  I hadn’t done it in a while because of a block, and a situation with someone which put me off.  But mostly I didn’t write because I felt I didn’t want to make my plays work in the conventional dramatic arc way.  People who commissioned my plays would say they want form-breaking plays but then by the second draft they wanted a dramatic arc.  And actually as a theatre maker I’d always been taking risks with the form.

    I’m pushing about the research question, it’s shifting a bit.  

    It’s becoming more about how the audience has agency.  And the Jennifer Doyle book, the thing about feeling.  And how that is in contemporary art – it’s really slippery – how artists deal with feelings and audience.

    Jonathan – how do you define the difference between audience agency and audience interaction?

    I think in so-called immersive work audience interaction is so ‘pat’ – we did this and that made the audience do that.  It manipulates the audience – it’s like there’s not respect.  It sort of feels as exclusive as how people describe regular theatre.  The people who attend live art or immersive art – it’s like an in-joke.  A club.  It’s inaccessible.

    We talk a bit about how Tim’s play Toto Kerblammo uses binaural sound – and Jonathan has played a lot with that.  The difference being spatial for the sound.  So Tim and his sound designer have imagined how the sound of human feelings are for a dog.  ‘This is what you sound like when you feel abandoned’.  Beautiful. 

    Jonathan – I asked about agency and interaction.  You took audience interaction as an actor interacting.  I was thinking about the work in say an exhibition.

    Interactive art can be quite shallow e.g. digital computing ‘I move and something changes’.  Audience as paint brush.  So is the difference respect – in the word agency?

    I say yes – respect for their intelligence and imagination.  You could say when you control the entire experience – which theatre tries to do, tries to shape – there’s less space for the audience.  But perhaps a piece of abstract art may leave tonnes of space for the audience to do what they want with it.  But also there’s a sort of coolness – ‘make of it what you will’ – that the intentions of the artist is so distant to the response that you could say the artist doesn’t seem to care?

    Jonathan – is time to do with that?  It starts at 7.30pm – is there a fundamental difference there?

    And if you’re not controlling what time the audience spend there, say maybe something happens at 4 but otherwise you can go in and out.   Then what? 

    Jonathan loved the Rachel Maclean show in Liverpool which does loop round and round, but had a clock counting down and if you see it on that particular time there is an experience like theatre.  She uses curtains opening automatically at certain times.  

    I wish I could see it.  

    We talk about actor Ralph Little playing being tortured in a production of The Spy Who Came In From The Cold – which Jonathan saw recently and felt really uncomfortable at.  There is an experience of coming outside of the show/story and being live in a room when Little has his head held underwater.   Are you watching anymore or worrying about being the audience member who witnessed the accidental death of a beloved TV actor?

    Of course it will have been done really safely – a tube, a safe word etc – although it was pretty well done.  Still viscerally different from watching it on film.

    I say that very few film-makers have ever got away with doing ‘meta’ film.  We buy into the game that it is real.  

    We talk about the sense that the audience have more agency in the object animation theatre piece I saw ‘Matter Era’ – because they know more about what’s going on than the puppeteers with magnets under the metal stage.  It was time and time again about jeopardy and failure – and like improv – the audience understood that in the moment.

    I found the design breathtakingly simple.  And it was a really long time before anything happened. Too long in theatre terms.  Playwright / Director David Lan (formerly at the Young Vic) – used to say when a show starts there is a finite amount of time for the audience before they lose interest.  But we didn’t really even notice Matter Era start…just these oily blueberries started to just…be there.  You couldn’t quite say what those things were representing, the furry things that were breathing, the sticks, silly bits of string.  You projected what you saw in it.  

    It pushed the limits of what time should do in theatre.  

    The sound designer was improvising off the action in the room.  

    It was just wild.  

    The way the final image arrived out of the various objects, was kind of an accident, an improvised story sort of, of failure and effort.  

    It felt like the objects had an inner life.

    In collusion with the audience.

    I describe Animo an improvised studio show I used to do with Improbable Theatre, where sometimes we would bring pieces of newspaper to life.

    Matter Era was. Right on the edge of visual art.  And theatre.

    People kind of respected the space, but didn’t interfere – respecting the rules of the game – which was to discover it.  It wasn’t like some performance art piece where it was more ‘I left this here do something with it’

    We talk a bit about the problems of badly done performance art – the lack of consideration of the space, where the audience are to be, how the elements are going to play out and whether that has even been tested. Surely there’s a way of making good quality decisions about how performance art is going to work – even if you then want to break all the conventions and ‘rules’?

    With Matter Era you had that sense of being in safe hands even though they were improvising, and even though they were pushing their control of the work to the limits.

    And yet like improv – if it’s really genuine and you put aside comedy sketches – you have to embrace the possibility of it really failing.  If it’s to be really improvised.  

    There are ways of controlling improv so it doesn’t fail – putting in tricks and landing places, rehearsing stock moves, casting big star improvisors who always make a ‘good night of it’.  All of the mid-scale improv does this.  But real improvised work is different.

    The audience embracing the possibility of failure.  That’s the sweet spot.

    Jonathan makes a note of this – as he feels from his perspective that this line of enquiry could make a research paper that’s really worth reading.  Bringing that theatre maker perspective – how the audience have agency (rather than just interaction), teasing that and understanding that.  That could be really valuable for Fine Art practice. That has implications of what we make. And how we curate and set up exhibitions.  

    A PHD colleague of Jonathan’s – writing about Curation – was thinking about ‘palette cleansers’ – how in a world where we’re bombarded with millions of images – can we visually cleanse the pallets and experience the flavours.  A bit like the theatre – the rituals of the stairs and the tickets and the seats.  Jonathan singing You’ll Never Walk Alone at the football in Liverpool with the years of history collectively – we’re doing something together in the moment.  A lot to tease out and maybe beneficial.

    Coming full circle – I’ve been thinking about this all my life.

    But what are the lessons that can be learned across those boundaries for art practice?

    Because as Doyle says – there’s a sort of coolness – it often feels it doesn’t sort of matter to the artist what happens with the audience experience.  

    It’s about to do with caring about what the audience get.  Without contriving it.  

    I talk about my Improbable Theatre friend Lee Simpson’s idea of finding a perfect moment in theatre.  He tells this story.  It’s like a shy deer has wandered on – and we all hold our breath because a wrong feeling or noise and it will run off.  The key point is liveness.  It’s just wandered in.  Now we could shoot the deer, stuff it, wheel it in on a trolley at the same moment every night.  But it won’t be the same because it won’t be spontaneous.

    There’s a fragility. Allowing the audience’s care to be part of the experience.

    Jonathan – what are the lessons of that for an exhibition that may be open for a month or more?

    There can be some kind of liveness on the opening night, but the rest of the time?

    Could you have the quality of the deer in a piece that stays for a long time with no-one present.

    Is it about time-based work?  Or can you have a sense of spontaneity in the way the work looks or is set up so it has a sense of liveness?

    Gosh I need another year.

    Quote Jonathan found recently – ‘All art is the creation of forms symbolic of human feeling’ – Susan Langer?

    The objects in Matter Era had feeling.  I remember a theatre making peer of mine Paul Hunter (of Told By An Idiot) saying that if a character is angry instead of writing dialogue literally, like you would say in Eastenders, we might just see them burst into flames.

    What’s really speaking to me in Doyle’s work is there’s this coolness in some contemporary art that leaves me cold.  Is it coolness towards the audience?

    There is space and agency for what the audience does with it – do what you like with it… but where does that tip over into ‘I don’t even care what your response is or even if I did anything for you at all – you’re so far away from me’.

    A colleague of Jonathan’s wrote a course called Public Art.  It would sit within socially engaged practice (he notes an essay worth reading that’s very against socially engaged practice).  Joseph Beuys talks of Social Sculpture – the idea of audience and artist are together forming things.  It’s let see what happens – put things in place and see what happens.  Anyway one of his definitions of whether art is public or not (Duchamp said it becomes art when audience sees it) – he said a work of art is not a work of art unless two strangers talk about it together.  

    He was thinking about work in a Gallery.  Can be love, anger or whatever it is that provokes you but you spoke to someone you don’t know and a whole different experience appears.  A thought experiment – it needs that level of engagement before it becomes something real.  

    And I think there’s that thing about access – and how I think a lot of ‘immersive theatre’ is an exclusive club.  Who’s going to turn to the person next to them? A middle class person could do that like a shot. 

    But also non-‘arts attendees’ might say ‘what’s that? My five year old son could do that’

    Who owns it?

    Jonathan talks of a 13th Century painting bought by the city of Hull when it was City of Culture.  It cost 3 million pounds.  He remembers a guy with his kid, didn’t look like he went to shows like this.  He walked straight up to it.  He said to his son ‘That’s ours that is’, then to Jonathan ‘It’s good isn’t it?’  That sense of civic pride.  700 years after the thing was made.

    Jonathan thinks there’s a lot in this line of enquiry.  “It’s a really interesting paper but it plays into your practice, there’s value in it.  

    Accept your expertise and bring that across to this – that is real value – whatever it looks like.

    It’s a big area sure, so you’ll have to narrow it down, but embrace your decades of expertise and all of us will benefit.”  

  • On the border of Theatre and Fine Art

    What do I mean by this? I’m picking up some threads of things coming together for me based on some recent theatre experiences which have danced around with the definitions of Theatre and Fine Art.  But are not ‘Live Art’.  Live Art is another thing in my mind – and much less connected to the practice and crafts involved in theatre making and more close to being an area of Fine Art but with liveness and..people..? My definition anyway.  I don’t have many examples in my experience (but am glad to be corrected) of Live Art taking responsibility for it’s audience with any kind of care or skill. Massive generalisation but that’s my experience.

    Two shows I saw recently that made me really sit up. ‘Matter Era’ by Tim Spooner and Terrapin at the Battersea Art Centre – an experimental London venue where I cut my teeth as a messy young theatre maker.  Matter Era was technically a puppetry show, object animation being the preferred term these days – and the craft I’m referring to is the skill of the Puppeteers.  Who remained invisible beneath the metal stage, moving the objects around with magnets.  And most interestingly they couldn’t SEE what they were doing.  (Unless there was some kind of live video feed perhaps?) There was this element of surprise and jeopardy, that you would get in an improvised show, because without a direct manipulation the objects would sometimes fall out of their control.  And that became story. The audience, as in any improvised piece, become complicit moment by moment in that story by being more knowledgable about what was going on above the Puppeteers. (Who are famously shy folk – so there’s something rather lovely about them hiding below with magnets and anonymity).

    Above or On stage – an ethereal wild world of dreams where objects (thinking of Jane Bennet’s book Vibrant Matter) have agency.  None of the objects were realistic or recognisable – sort of like twigs, sort of like fur, sort of like fat blueberries covered in oil.  But all with some kind of recognisable quality we can attach a feeling to.  There was so much space for the audience – which is exactly what I want to deal with – and it was just beautiful.

    I also want to speak about my friend Tim Crouch’s work.  Tim is an extraordinary theatre-maker – after Caryl Churchill I would say he is the most significant experimental theatre writer at work in the UK today.   What I went to see was him in actor-mode rather than his own work – but his take on ‘The Tempest’ at the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse was absolutely in line with his tireless experimentation with the form.  Prospero is normally cited as the Shakespearean hero connected with the idea of forgiveness but Tim’s Prospero as I saw it was not moving on in forgiveness but playing over his wrongs and how to right them over and over on a loop. Perhaps more like we do in life.  As usual he broke most of the rules of theatre – it was quite slow (I felt mesmerically slow but he definitely tests the levels of patience) and it didn’t really end or conclude but rather looped back round again.  Like bitterness does, feeding itself like a beast

    An update to this post: I also saw Tim’s Toto Kerblammo this weekend. (Alot of Tim in my life by chance at the mo, this one he’d invited my mentee Zoe along to his rehearsals for) Kerblammo-ed by this piece which takes the audience into the internal world and sensescape of a child in a coma and her dying dog by using binaural sound on headphones. It was a live play, a radio story, a one on one piece in a way whilst also being a shared experience. Sidenote – it occurs to me I am noticing work that works directly with emotion lately (this the unvoiced topic of child mental health)…

    Got to speak about his play ‘An Oak Tree’.  Inspired by artist Craig Martin’s work that self-declared the glass of water exhibited on a high shelf was in fact an oak tree.  Martin says on the Tate website  –

    “The Oak Tree was meant to be ‘how do I create the maximum imaginable transformation?’ and my way of doing it was to produce no transformation at all.”

    In Tim’s namesake play the second actor has never seen the script before. So their reading of the grieving father they’re playing is loaded with confusion along with those strange blanks and spikes of interrupted thought that anyone who has experienced grief can probably recognise.  

    Tim says – 

    ‘I take responsibility for how audience receive my work’

    This is really speaking to me right now as I reconsider what kind of work I really want to make. 

    As the two disciplines creep towards each other and cross over and meet and join up and speak to each other…

    I want to think more about what it really feels like to be on the receiving end of my art making.  I can take responsibility for that.  

  • Talking to my Dad about making art

    Session with Rebecca Fortnum, artist and researcher, about ‘correspondence’.  Rethinking how we do research as artists.  Collecting data and other traditional methods may not work – and she raised the question who is the best judge of the work.  Is the audience?  Not always.  The critics?  The artist themself – and at what point?  Retrospectively or immediately after making a thing?  

    Fortnum has made work in ‘correspondence’ with other artists, often marginalised female practitioners, giving voices to say the Practiciennes supported by Rodin.  She explores their voices through letters, through investigating images from a different angle, her viewfinder closing in on large figurative sculpture and honing in on say, a detail in an expression. She gives us another way of looking at a 3D piece by flattening it into a painting.  I write down the word ‘prosopopoeia’ – making the inanimate have a voice.  Are we doing that in what we chose to hone in on?  Giving a moment or a feeling or an idea a form.  I feel that I’ve done that in the past with writing and today is a writing exercise day.  

    When we work in homage to another artist, or in response to or have correspondence with, we are still making our own voices heard.  As Tim brilliantly says ‘you are writing to the significance they have for you’.  

    We are asked who would you like to have a conversation with in relation to your work.  I work on an imagined dialogue with my late father. In his last months he told me about an opportunity he had by chance (coincidence comes up several times today) which saw him and a bunch of other South London kids who’d had a tough life, as part of a progressive education project, transported to the countryside and a classical education.  Something I have tried to research but never got very far with.  Partly maybe I resist that research because he kept this story from me for most of his life for his own reasons.  To me it is a moment of glorious post-war optimism which he chanced upon (how chance could have taken him another way) and that changed who he was and who I am in turn.  

    So I wrote about this and mostly I think I am actually writing about the hopelessness of ever getting a full answer from him now that he’s left us.  He was an unreliable narrator at the best of times.  

    *******

    Talking to my Dad about making art.

    But what did you make Dad?

    It was a golden time.  One of the tutors there was a contemporary of Henry Moore you know, very respected.  

    You said

    And then it was all over and Nan came to fetch me and we went back to Camberwell.  She was with Stan then.  Grandad Stan.  I didn’t like him.  

    But what did you make Dad?

    Well, that was it, it was all over.  It was the same when I got into Grammar School.  When I passed the eleven plus.  She got the hump about that.

    I know

    She had to fork out for a uniform and she was livid.  

    And that was Wilson’s Grammar School.

    What is Camberwell Art School yes.  Terrible place, Wilson’s.

    And Johnny said you had an exhibition in the little library on Camberwell Green?

    Yes

    What was it of Dad?

    Paintings.

    What kind?

    Near Kennedy’s Butchers.  Best sausages.

    In the whole of London.  But what were the paintings of Dad?

    It was a golden time at that school, the one I went to.  We listened to opera and read Shakespeare.

    And you learnt sculpture.

    Yes, she was a contemporary of the great Henry Moore.

    What sort of work did you make Dad?  

    I was pissed off when Elsie turned up with Stan. Nasty piece of work Stan.  

    And you went to Cambridge?

    I enrolled in the poly and I was a milkman.

    Did you still make art Dad?

    Lovely city Cambridge.  Full of people and ideas.

    Maybe you could have made some art later on.

    No Al, no.

    Why not Dad?

    Never time.

    Would you make some art now Dad, if you were still here?

    Maybe.

    What would we do today Dad?

    We would take a trip into town and see Rose Wylie if it’s still on.  A feast of colour. 

  • Perverse conditions

    Had a long chat with Jonathan about the feedback on the Assessment and what is most helpful for me right now.  Unpacking what I mean by something more critical, and tangible to build on.  Especially in regards to research.  Quite rightly he asked what would I tell myself in regards to feedback and this opened up a bigger thought about why I’m doing the MA.  I see my imposter syndrome – in fact I bore myself with the amount of space that takes up in my blog.   And I do feel I’m in the right place in terms of my approach to the journey – and take the encouragement to ‘do more of the same’.  But I guess although the aim is independence in one’s practice I’m here for the critical engagement, and ultimately of course if I’m making art it’s not just for me.  Like a hobby or an indulgence or something that exists just for myself.  It is a public thing.

    I want to find out how my work operates in relationship to the world.  To outside myself.  In dialogue with others.  I want to affect people.  

    So unpacking that really helps clarify things for me.  I am engaging with my own conversation with myself.  But I’m here for the rigorousness of criticality and the outside world.  And that doesn’t have to be in the art school tradition of aggressive critiques (we have enough artists who have been trained to talk impressively about their work in written explanation and I’m not convinced there’s much beyond defensiveness sometimes).  I’m glad that this MA puts kindness at the forefront of the journey.  But I’m here to go on a journey of discovery, and that means not just circling around myself, but to make use of the expertise and knowledge of Central Saint Martins. 

    So we unpacked my aims on the Study Statement – which starts with ‘break open my practice’.  Which sounds dramatic to Jonathan, what do I mean?  Actually that is exactly what I mean, I kind of feel that something is too contained, to subject to the demands of the medium and what I expect I have to do with it, the constraints of the firing schedule (always one step forward two steps back – now the firings are apparently fixed dates – but…every 6 weeks as opposed to the monthly on the contract), I feel like I want to put a bomb under my practice in order to see what remains.  

    I want to own it.  Jonathan – own what exactly?

    Well the transition from ideas to making is really clunky.  Sketches to making feels really literal. 

    I talk about the journey from making this thing from ideas to what I presented.  Now as I write this I’m looking in my sketchbook at drawings of Bruegel’s Mad Meg and the Fall of the Rebel Angels.  None of which made it beyond the cutting room floor.  Although actually…the idea of falling did.  So maybe exploring any visual hunch is good.  Blind alleys are maybe more interesting than just sticking to the path.  

    We talked about the qualities of other people’s work that inspires me most – I keep returning to Yuki Nakamura’s ‘Fragile like life’ porcelain footballs.  More than anything I loved with that the concept of play and joy and of breath and life (deflated football) in this sad hospital garden.  And the something so generous about the ‘here and gone’ nature of the installation that speaks to me of the weirdness of time spent in the bubble of caring and hospital visits.  

    I also speak about my friend Tim Crouch’s play An Oak Tree.  I’m going to talk about that in the next blog post (which I was halfway through writing when this Jonathan conversation came in) 

    Tim is an interesting example for me.  An actor turned playwright doesn’t quite sum it up.  Aside from Caryl Churchill he’s probable the most ground-breaking playwright in the UK.   He’s kind of moved playwrighting towards conceptual art.  But what I want to say at this point is – there is this care and attention, simply to Nakamura’s piece, of how the work really works for an audience. Beyond basic curatorial choices, drilling deeper into how and why the audience meets the work in the way that it does.  

    It’s that specificity I am after.  

    That maybe what ‘owning it’ would look like.  I understand audience (Gaulier taught me that, improv taught me that, making site specific theatre on beaches and in village halls and working mens clubs, my indie theatre company was all about how to mess with the live experience).  Staging the chairs and the figures and the plinth and being very deliberate about how they were presented in the space was a positive thing.  

    So the space between my experience and what I want to do with my work is at the pull between intention and spontaneity.  

    When it’s out the in the world I can’t control the experience in the way I can with live performance.  Although our long form improv shows were in the the chaos of the unknown we did work in great detail on how we controlled that one sentence set-up at the start for the audience – the only scripted line – in order to allow the audience to put aside their expectations, nervousness and cynicism about whether it’s even improvised at all – so that they could get on with experiencing the thing we wanted them to experience. 

    I think I’m often most creative when I’m creating perverse conditions for my work.  

    And perhaps that’s what I want to break open.  

    Feeling.  Relationship. What relates.  What is affective?

    This is not about controlling meaning.  This is not about starting with the end in mind.  This is definitely not about a textual explanation on a card on the wall.  This is about interrogating the conditions in which the audience meets the work whilst – and this is the paradoxical bit perhaps – whilst giving them space to do whatever they want with it.  

    So to go back to improv – we are letting go of all control over the structure and meaning and in fact also the quality perhaps of the story we tell – in favour of allowing the wild ride of spontaneity.  And we’re allowing them to believe in something that we’re told is impossible – because conventional practice would have us believe it takes one genius man in a room to write a play.   Jonathan reminded me of this quote from Keith Johnstone’s seminal ‘Impro’


    “People try to use what they know. They want to be ‘right.’ But I prefer to see people who don’t know what they’re doing and take strange paths.”

    I worked though some big things in this generous conversation with Jonathan in how my audience meet the work.  Or maybe the question is what is it about the work that allows my practice to meet the audience.

    That’s maybe why I asked the question ‘what’s the most exciting thing that is growing’.  Because that’s what I need to know, and that’s not ‘what’s most exciting’ to me.  That’s an outward seeking question, in relation with my work and the world. 

  • On the outside looking in

    I’m reading ‘Hold it against me’ by Jennifer Doyle about difficulty and emotion in art.  It’s waking something up in me, have only just begun it so maybe I will write more on this later.  It’s making me feel there’s a purpose I can latch onto here.  I know that seems ridiculous – as if there isn’t a purpose when of course there are a million kinds of purpose to the art I might want to make but right now my brain is a bit clouded, overcast.  Too many open tabs.

    The interim show was a wonderful experience.  I still feel strangely unattached to what I made although I feel I did resolve it successfully and the piece got a lot of positive responses.  I want to understand why I feel so flat about it.  But also, as art critic Jerry Saltz says – your art is a flatworm (earthworm in UK) – cut it in half and from it grows another piece.  I love this idea.  From the piece I made I am drawn to the the feeling of the figures – and perhaps I should commit to exploring the figure more – people / character is something I’ve studied hard as an actor / theatre maker.  Story.  The relationship with the audience.  I also enjoyed the spatial dynamics, the setting of the multiple chairs.  The box.  I like the glaze.  But why this material?  Why clay?

    I am feeling today at odds with the ceramics world. I’m mentoring for Arts Emergency – and it feels so good to be doing this – I am sick of and angry about how privilege in the arts stores up opportunity for itself and it’s friends and how that depletes the art world for everyone. The theatre world witters on about this while doing nothing in general but the ceramics scene seems entirely unaware about the need to address inequality at all – in this most resource-hungry of practices.  I am trying to find a way to help raise maybe $30k for my mentee who has got into the prestigious acting school Julliard in NYC.  It’s a gargantuan task.  Ironically at the same time I’m not sure if I can pay my rent.  

    I needed a break after the intensity of the first assessments and the interim show.  Brain depleted. RSD. The residency week was glorious.  The cohort continue to inspire and delight me – we are such a cast of characters.  Each one of us so different from the next, and the sense of a community of support and practice is real – I feel so blessed.  It kind of feels like a bit of a dream, to spend a week with these brilliant people.  The printmaking workshop was a highlight and I’m galvanised to make more 2D work and maybe look more at printmaking on clay.  I also saw some really brilliant art shows and discovered some new galleries.  On the subject again of money I had a fascinating conversation with Betty on the bus to Peckham about art that fetishises poverty – or ‘poverty porn’ as we call it when it shows up in playwrighting.  

    An artist who could never make poverty porn, although she will no doubt have been accused of it, is Tracey Emin.  Her Tate show tore me apart.  She speaks about her reality, she is an open wound.  Surprising number of men seem to think she should shut up and stop going on about rape and trauma.  

    She is an artist and she works with the material she has – her life.  Do I, could I, do that? (I remember actually after Nick Cave, yes he’s a man yes, after Nick Cave wrote a beautiful song about the recent death of his son and some girl I know from my hometown said on social media that it was distasteful and I…I have no words to say about that person.  The guy is a f-ing artist)

    I like that Doyle differentiates between two kinds of difficult.  The intellectually challenging ‘difficult’ art turns away from the spectator who feels inadequate, not ‘fully initiated’ into the ‘sociology of contemporary art.’  The only feeling for the spectator I guess is – they are on the outside looking in.  I can relate to that.  And then – and this may relate to my research – she talks of difficult art where the spectator is inextricably complicit in a kind of witnessing that is very personal.

    ‘This is where ideology does it’s most devastating work…This is where we come to know the contours of our selves, our bodies, our sense of soul’

    I’m feeling kind of worked up right now as you can probably hear.  I feel like something is coming and not coming.  I’m blocked.  I wrote to Jonathan to say I was confused about the feedback on Unit One, it was clearly full of praise but nothing solid I could build on, I wanted more specificity.

    I’m really looking forward to the class starting up again after this three week break, to seeing everyone, to find out what’s next.  

    My writing mentor Chris Thorpe once gave me the most useful feedback about a first draft I was making –

    ‘What’s the most difficult thing that this is not saying?’

  • The Opposite is Also True

    So finally after all the challenges of firing schedules and making I opened Baby Diana the smaller kiln (being D or ABC – Agnes, Barbara and Collette – names which sound like cool and distant goddesses to me) which I’d tenaciously had to negotiate in this less than ideal process.  

    First of all – the glaze on the large slab built box is the most beautiful effect.  Swamp lichen – a reactive glaze with Crater over it. It looks like water and foam and swimming pools which is a thing colour wise that has been emerging for me for this project.  (I’ve become interested in an extraordinary film called Ten Meter Tower a 17 minute short film training the camera on Swedish people considering jumping off a very high tower in a local pool – which I think is another whole post…)

    It also has a giant crack across the corner side seam.  Where the box fell and was reassembled during making.  When this sort of thing happens (scaling up slab building, the box was tricky) it’s kind of inevitable that even though you fix the seam beautifully, inside and out, and then you even add a little vinegar slip when it’s drying…the clay remembers like a damaged child.  It all comes out when it’s all grown up. 

    So part of a breakthrough was that I was going to explore fragility.  That breaking things may be part of it. It’s almost poetic justice in a way.  But also the perfectionist that haunts and hampers me says – remember that girl on your course last year who used to present all thrown and failed pots as intentional…well…her…

    All sorts of narratives appear such as – ‘hey all the ceramicists know about this kind of crack’.  It’s not a beautiful accident – it’s poor making.  

    I feel at once full of hatred and joy.  Shame and excitement.  Disappointment and triumph.   Is this what making visual art is?  All art?  I remember the knot in my shoulders after listening to my first play read-through at RSC – it felt like the worst two hours of my life.  Even though everyone loved it and thought it went really well and my agent was crying.  (In a good way haha…)

    So.  

    I have things to play with, which is what I’m interested in anyway right?  Currently I have four different elements in my work which I could use – they don’t hang together in ay concievable coherent way.  In my opinion.  Right now. 

    The figures – some of them have an interesting quality.  Some are just ‘cute’.

    I have made lots of tiny orange chairs.  They have no visual or stylistic connection to the other bits.  Apart from municipal swimming pools.  They might be good to play with.  

    The parian figures that I had to try so hard to get fired – they need a slow ramp to temperature – but can be fired in one glaze fire no bisque.  They’re…just.  I don’t like them.  They feel like tests that I should have finished ages ago.  I think they’re not going to be any part of whatever happens next.

    Another thing I could do is take a hammer to the whole thing.  

    Gaby – who I wrote of earlier – is teaching throwing on Tuesday in the Ceramics Gallery / Studio I work in – I will ask her what she would do.  Gaby reassembles the detritus of kiln firings.  I notice a small part of this is me wanting Ceramicsworld to give me an acceptable answer.

    Anyway.  Off to work…

    …and in the afternoon my friend Trui Malten walks into the Gallery.  Trui is an extraordinarily smart and funny theatre lighting designer.  I showed her my pictures of the beautiful glaze and the big crack.  And my Fine Art insecurities.  And she says – 


    “What would theatre say?  Put it in the space.  See what it means”

    She says it’s right that the crack is like it is.  Accidents and change have always been part of my practice.  That’s actually what I’m writing about according to my Study Statement.    

    ‘My friend is a theatre designer who got so sick of the transient nature of theatre he had to become an architect’. Trui is really funny and really smart as I say. 

    Chance.  Is there if you are open to it.  It’s always there.  

    Today as working am only able to join Jonathan’s session during my lunch break and it’s about ‘Dérive’.  The Situationist’s idea of wandering, drifting, following one’s nose.  And it’s not just a creative whim – it’s anti-capitalist.  It’s as if not more urgent now as the world is imploding into mediocrity, fake news and identikit shopping centres.  Alongside the rise of structural disenfranchisement, extremist right-wing politics, extremist misogny etc etc etc etc etc.

    Suddenly talking to Trui a whole multi-disciplinary chain of connections opens up.

    Maybe if I was riffing on my thoughts today, the class that I was half in and out of, the surprise inspiration from Trui it might look something like this 

    • my work, acceptable or not to the ceramicist world, to the art world, what does Gaby think, what does Collect 2026 think, that will be positive inspiration at least, but also overwhelming, my class is exploring ‘dérive’ and following their noses, it’s different to not be in the class I miss it, oh Trui arrives, she’s not in Italy, she’s bringing cakes and I forgot to pack snacks, theatre sets get thrown in a skip what a waste, what’s sustainable, damaged creative ceramic children, ah once again theatre has the answers for me, break everything and start again, it will be ok, why am I making this work that looks like theatre sets, that’s not ceramic art, then a guy walks in to the Gallery, he really enjoyed Collect will I be going (yes), look out for his work, he’s from Nova Scotia, Trui and I google him, Neil Forrest, oh look his work looks like theatre sets, little figures, I love ceramics, I hate ceramics.

    My friend Niall Ashdown is maybe one of the best improvisors in the world.  We teach together sometimes.  He often says when people question the ‘rules of improv’ that he wants to get a t-shirt made that says – 


    The Opposite is Also True

  • Je ne regrette rien 

    Remembering Philippe Gauler 1943-2026

    Yesterday I went to Paris to attend the extraordinary funeral of the teacher who changed the course of my life Philippe Gaulier.  In the sometimes murky world of artist training Gaulier is perhaps the most widely and wildly misunderstood pedagogue of all.  Perhaps we all assembled from around the world yesterday – how many? maybe 600 of us – because we wanted to hold onto that magical thread of his teaching specifically by being together…because we were there…because we know it.  Perhaps we all feel tired by having to listen – every time his name comes up – to the broken record of criticism spewing from the mouths of people who never even went to his school regarding his somewhat unorthodox teaching style. As Simon McBurney put it he was –

    ‘provocative, demanding, deliberately inappropriate and utterly hilarious’ 

    The elusive cornerstone of his school was to find that ‘complicité’ on which McBurney, Arden and Magni founded the namesake company – the inferred danger and delight in being connected (with each other, with the audience) when we play.  Do we have pleasure to be on the stage?  If not why bore us? ’Adios, sit down immediately, my little friend’.  Gaulier actors read audience in a way that no other actors do and that is what I am proud to know. It will be in my bones.  It was in the bones of us, connected together when we – a giant congregation – burst into ‘Non, Je ne regrette rien’ along with Piaf as we saw the old fella off on his way.  And we might be messy and we may not do things ‘correctly’ but we will do it with heart and a kind of passion that is very rarely really seen on stage.  Spontaneous, huge applause, whooping, cheering, Bravo, Bravo went off as he was carried up the long theatrical staircase to disappear into the glittery backdrop of blue-sky mosaics of La Coupole in Pere Lechaise cemetery.    

    I began at Gaulier’s school aged 25, just two months after losing my mother.  Philippe taught me to feel again and how to be free.

    Why am I writing about this here?  Because what I am looking for is not and should not be definitive or even precisely known.  This is the same for fine art, for performance, for poetry, for playwriting, for art installation, for ceramics, for concept art, for music – definitely not for music – for opera, for dance, for education…for making anything at all really, I think.  

  • Immaculate Heart College Art Department Rules

    Been turning over in my mind the 10 rules from Corita Kent’s Immaculate College of Art that we looked at in the last session.  It occurs to me that Kent’s rules are so fresh precisely because she wasn’t (for a long time) accepted or part of the art establishment, that her outsider status gave her permission.  That somehow not being accepted can actually be a freeing thing.   Being outside of something being a ‘point of departure’ – to return to Alex Schady’s quote (see earlier blog) that comforted me when I was worrying about being from a different art discipline.  I recently watched ‘Maudie’ – a biopic of outsider artist Maud Lewis played beautifully by Sally Hawkins.  Maud Lewis just painted images everywhere she could find, over the furniture and the walls of her tiny Nova Scotian hut.  In terms of the collective judgement of the art establishment Lewis had a lot in common with Kent – no recognition until much later in life – and a delegation to the ranks of ‘outsider’ status.  Problematic word – ‘Outsider Artist’.  What defines the Inside, if you put aside more cynical ideas such as class, money, contacts and a nice stable upbringing that means you can work the room at a Private View…?  Something defined must have rules or there is no definition.  But artists break rules – don’t they?  Shouldn’t they?

    What’s refreshing about Lewis and Kent is they keep making.  Rather like wise Yoda’s – they either do or do not, there is no try.  Keep putting things down on paper, or any surface.  Make.  Don’t think.  Try trusting.  Rule no. 1 is that you try trusting for a while.

    Yesterday I forgave the sorrowful kind of realistic figures I was making (which I am resisting because of what…taste, trends, some sense of what’s ok to do – and that literally nobody has told me not to do).  I just committed to them and I believed that if I endow them with seriousness and validity – then maybe they would have this.  

    Actors do this also.  When they don’t commit – or they half commit – everything falls apart. So again, the other discipline contributes to my work.

    Rule No 8* (which should be tattooed on my forehead) – 

    “Don’t try to create and analyse at the same time.  They’re different processes.”

  • Nebulous

    Transience and permanence, the constant

    Monuments + sculpture – marking in time making valid – heaviness

    Transience – ephemeral, nebulous – lightness

    And audience 

    Experience of art – the transient nature of the encounter = becomes validated by memory and the quality of experience

    How it makes you feel

    What you feel is how you remember.  (Often attributed to Maya Angelou – ‘…people will forget what you said, they will forget what you did, but they will never forget how they made you feel’)

    Transience is moving, through time, moving on from, beginnings and endings, here and gone

    Permanence is stillness – rocks, monuments, weightiness, significance

    But in theatre / improv audiences experience of something fleeting – the encounter feels special, unique, personal

    It is a two way relationship.  Not standing in front of.  But dancing with.

    Theatre and improvisation know about the value of transience to audience.  And specifically the shared experience of the moment.  The audience completes the work.

    Museums, archives, monuments, the canon of gold framed paintings, arguably most 2D visual art and all sculpture – deal with fixing in time, history, longevity, statements.  (There is hierarchy at work here – power – who choses what is permanent?)

    Ceramics in particular is elemental – earth and fire.  Survival of Mesopotamian pots – trace of man’s first technological advancement – but also evidence artistic expression.  They tell stories.

    Which is where theatre meets because it tells stories. 

    Time tells stories – beginning middle and end.  

    Without end – no story…?

    Or without end – audience completes story?

    Where is the audiences agency in the work – this is crucial to me. 

    Gilchrist – where we put our attention…attending as a moral act which changes the world…who does the attending?

    Artist role to draw attention.  To focus – to say look, here?  At what I see?

    How do you leave space?

    Notion that when we accept that there is no permanence that everything is changing, we are freed from fear of death and endings – Buddhism.

    Gruf Rhys –

    “Rocks are slow life”

    Even rocks are moving, changing.

    Climate disaster, landscapes shifting, mud moving…clay and earth subject to the elements.

    Toute Bouge (Everything moves / is moving) – Jacques Lecoq text

    Lecoq students study elements – physically.

    Presence in the theatre feels and looks like stillness but isn’t stillness, it’s kind of a vibration.  It’s an energy.  

    You can teach it to actors by making them play Grandmother’s Footsteps – when the child is forced to stand ‘like a statue’ – they are in fact holding themselves in preparation for immediate movement when Grandmother’s back is turned.

    Watch a cat pretend to not be about to catch a bird in the garden. 

    What personally does this mean for me?

    Theatre, improv

    Writing

    Making

    Clay

    Artmaking

  • Really in the Sauerkraut

    Had the most amazing and generous tutorial with Jonathan.  I’ve been feeling really stuck, whilst at the same time because of the complexities of the firing schedule at my studio (as detailed in my earlier blog) I’m having to press on and make regardless of stuckness, in order to have something for the interim show.  Not a great way to nurture my developing practice.

    During the tutorial, where we talked a lot about my multi-disciplinary practice and what that brings, I talked about the situation in devised theatre processes where it’s agreed that we’re stuck and we’ll have to wait.  In my company I used to refer to it as ‘waiting outside the cave until the dragon wants to come out’.  Mike Shepherd from Kneehigh frequently used the phrase ‘hold your nerve’.  And Kasia Zaremba-Byrne, a brilliant polish movement director, will often pause during choreo sessions and say ‘we’re really in the sauerkraut’.

    Am trying to refine what I want to explore here.  Pull the threads together.   There’s something that’s very clearly pertinent to my positionally as a ceramicist – given that ceramics once fired are fixed in time – and that I’ve come from a theatre background.  A theatre background specifically rooted in liveness and improvisation.  So it feels like time is going to be important.  Theatre is ephemeral, transient, here and now and then gone.  Ceramic is fixed in time, it survives thousands of years.  Being one of man’s first discoveries it sits deep in our consciousness that ceramic endures.

    But at the same time – the opposite is also true – ceramics break.

    Liveness, ethereal, transient…here and gone…fragility.

    The other – not unrelated – interest is movement.  My theatre background is largely physical, and so far I have choreographed my ceramic figures in dynamic spatial relationships.  Which does in turn create story.

    I’m aware of ceramicists who have a performative element to their work.  My pal Shane Keeling climbs on ladders to drop his pots to the ground.  And the artist Vidya Thirunarayan I met at the talk recently incorporates raw clay into her dance performances.  There is more to explore there, but I notice I am not drawn to performing in my fine art practice.  The challenge for me is finding the place where my performance experience intersects with my ceramic practice, without ceramics becoming consumed into my performance practice. 

    Jonathan asks – is it about the concepts, the shape or the material itself that you’re interested in?

    We talk about am I looking at movement in a phenomenological sense, or putting in mechanics so things move? Maybe movement isn’t the right word – maybe it’s more about space and distance and relationship.   The capture of the quality of movement (as per The Futurists explorations) seems too literal.

    Previously I thought about Puppeteers keeping puppets ‘live’ by breath-work. 

    Maybe the word is breath.

    Breathing space.

    Breath = life force.

    I keep returning to an assumption that I’m somehow obliged to abstract the figure because that’s what ceramicists do… (This is where trends and fashion are unhelpful).  A counter to that assumption is Claire Partington, a powerful ceramic artist that I love who…makes extraordinary ceramic figures.  Satirical, feminist, referencing flouncy 18th Century porcelain figurines – and with a theatricality and sense of space that I can relate to.  

    And that leads us to porcelain, how I have become captivated by this self-glazing kind called Parian.  And how I felt when I opened the kiln door, how perfect my Parian pots were (to me).  Want to note here this was quite an emotional session, my recent ADHD diagnosis came to the fore again because I’m seeing that my hampering perfectionism is infact me compensating for something / everything. When you’ve just discovered an entirely different truth about who you’ve been your whole life, trying to find what’s authentic is hard.  

    But also I am still me.

    I want to capture here somehow how meandering this tutorial / conversation is, because writing it down from my notes, it’s useful to notice that process of circling past the idea and back again.  

    Jonathan says that this kind of grappling does come before a breakthrough.

    Then I have this thought that if the ceramics are fixed maybe something else moves them, the floor perhaps.  A designer Jon Bausor that I worked with when directing a Ionesco play ‘The New Tenant’ at the Young Vic created a mechanism to vibrate the floor so that furniture could move by itself.  (This cuts a very long story short – the Tech was an all-nighter!)

    Jonathan finds me an instructable site about making a Chladni Plate, which uses low-frequency sound to create vibrations.  And tells me about an experimentation where bass sound caused an artwork he made, involving toy cows in a fish tank of milk, to move into formation. (I am nearly dismantling my bass amp at the end of this tutorial but then remember…it’s my bass amp).

    And then things come full circle for me because the missing piece is about the audience.  If I don’t want to perform but want to leave my work in a place for the audience to experience something, how do I create that sense of liveness, that sense of spontaneity, that transient quality that gives the audience space to dream, experience and feel? To be agents of their own interpretation.  I tell Jonathan about Yuki Nakamura’s ‘Fragile Like Life’ – the temporality of the deflated porcelain-cast footballs in a place where people are considering life and death.  The reference to life – and actually to breath – and to play and joy. 

    Maybe that’s why I’m currently drawn to porcelain.  It’s ethereal, nebulous and it feels fragile and precious.  People have a visceral reaction to the idea of porcelain breaking.

    Perhaps my figures move on this vibrating surface.  And they might fall off and break.  I might orchestrate that, or leave it entirely to chance.  I could even fire something once – they’d be fragile but that’s ok.

    Finding the something that allows the audience some breathing space. Jonathan reminds me that I’d spoken about placing objects in the space, the space between, the sharing of space and the dialogue between. 

    Gaby Mlynarczyk at the talk spoke about the negative space.  Painters understand negative space.  But I’m not sure it’s something we often think about with ceramics because the focus is on the thing, the material, the object itself.

    I began this tutorial full of panic at my dwindling options due the the firing schedule shenanigans and the time ceramics take.  I leave full of inspiration, with ideas to spare, having waded out of the sauerkraut.

    Jonathan – ‘You know on a foggy morning you know the sun is there.  That lingering in the fog can be really beneficial’.