BREAKING THE MOULD

Clare Twomey is a ceramic artist whose daring and inventive installations have helped to break down the notion that ceramics, of necessity, have any place on plinths or in glass cases. She talks with Veronica Simpson about the origins of her craft.

Clare Twomey isn’t one of the growing breed of avant garde craftsmen and women whose pieces are avidly snapped up by collectors – though lord knows, they’d like the opportunity. She doesn’t ‘do’ ownership. Her works are deliberately fragile, temporary. Last Christmas, for example, she installed a piece called ‘Blossom’ at the Eden Project in Cornwall, that saw 9,000 handmade ceramic flowers planted around the vast outdoor flower beds. Unfired, and exposed to the harsh winter elements, they slowly disintegrated back into the clay pit on which the Eden biodomes were built.

She has created installations to be walked on and broken, as well as pieces to be stolen: in 2006, she released 4,000 tiny ceramic birds into the V&A, in an event called ‘Trophy’. Handmade out of Wedgewood porcelain, these delicate blue creatures perched around the oversized busts and torsos of the ceramic gallery and gradually, over the course of five hours, found their way into peoples’ handbags and pockets until not a single bird was left. Clare intended for people to take them home but she didn’t tell them to do so – that happened naturally. And the only element of the show that endorsed this piece of audience reaction was a slip of paper they were handed on their way out asking for them to email her a picture of their bird and where it ended up, which many of them did.

‘I make work that has an open dialogue, that allows people to come in and get something out of it,’ she says. ‘I may take them on a journey, which I direct, but all of this work is about conversation. It’s about what happens when you are in front of it.’

Abstract Expressionism is what turned Clare on to art. ‘I loved Robert Rauschenberg, and the clay artist Peter Voulkos. My point of engagement was drawing, painting. So when I started making objects, it was all about Abstract Expressionism – what does a hand mark express, and what does the colour I use express, as well as the quality of the line.’

She studied ceramics and painting at Edinburgh College of Art and then completed an MA in ceramics at the Royal College of Art, London. ‘The Royal College of Art was really hard,’ she says. ‘I stopped drawing, which was brilliant – I had always fallen back on my drawing, because it came easily to me. So I had to find a new language. Martin Smith was my tutor. He was really fantastic. He knocked me into shape. They taught me how to think.’

Her work continued to explore the ways in which art can evoke emotion, but it was all about context and placement – and the use of repetitive or ‘ready made’ objects. ‘For me the RCA was about trying to make a leap from the self-indulgence of emotional expression (the idea that if you have expressed yourself, and your own emotions, that in itself validates your work) to something more universal.’

Her first piece, upon leaving the RCA, was called ‘Shoal’. It comprised 100 small, porcelain French nuclear submarines, suspended on wires and grouped to evoke a shoal of swimming fish. ‘They were nuclear submarines made from a very fragile, delicate material.’ The fish reference was profound – fish, certainly small ones, are perceived as gentle, non-threatening creatures. And at this point, in the 1990s, the French were still cheerfully testing their nuclear bombs in the Pacific Ocean. ‘The language was very specific. It didn’t rely on my emotional context,’ she says, ‘it relied on the information that was in the piece.’

Clare pushed her ‘conversation’ with the viewer to its limits with Consciousness/Conscience (2001), inviting them to destroy the work as they explored it. She created, with the support of Royal Crown Derby, a huge display of bone china bricks, which were laid across the gallery floor, intending for them to be walked on and knowing that the weight of any individual on this fragile material would crush these bricks. At the time, Clare stated: ‘It focuses on the destruction and creation of the work itself. This action of destruction through human curiosity alludes to a much broader debate that human actions have on our natural environment and the responsibility we must all take for the effects of our actions upon nature.’ As people walked across the room, they left tracks, like footprints in the snow.

But though breaking something precious made of china is always stressful it’s most upsetting when that item means something to you.

‘Heirloom’ (2004) explored the emotional significance of china in a new way. For the Mission gallery in Swansea, she requested locals from far and wide to bring in their heirlooms – treasured china teapots, tureens, gold plated butter dishes, the lot. Tokens poured forth. Says Clare: ‘We cast them, then I arranged the casts in a specific room.’ Some were embedded in the wall, others standing proud, some mere whispers of an outline, like ghosts. ‘I controlled the composition. It was almost like a piece of theatre. I knew where people would come into the room, and what they’d see. I piled them up in one area so that it looked like they were going to come tumbling down on top of you.’

When the exhibition opened, people crowded in to see their heirlooms given new life and meaning. ‘It was incredible, the stories that we were told in front of each piece. It’s that point of contact, that’s where the power lies.’

If it can’t be bought, how does Clare fund her work? ‘Up until about two years ago I was completely funded by grants - university grants, research grants.’ Now a lot of her work is specially commissioned.

‘To commercially understand where you are and what you’re doing takes a long time. I’ve been practising for 15 years, so I’m really glad that there’s a value to my work. But I’m not sure it’s something I would want to have been looking for early on.

‘It’s very difficult to take ownership of my work, because it doesn’t last very long. It’s almost event led. It has a performative aspect. It can’t slide into public collections.’

But strangely, because her work is so ephemeral, it lingers in the mind far longer than some Grecian bust on its plinth. Perhaps it’s the shared experience that cements the meaning of her work into peoples’ minds. I’d love to have known what the visitors to the Eden project thought about all those perfectly formed flowers made of china strewn about the beds over new year. How many would have paused to read about its inspiration?

Clare’s work has a strong element of social commentary to it, and ‘Blossom’ was no exception. It came out of a collaboration with the Cape Farewell Trust, a consciousness-raising environmental organisation, best known for taking artists and writers out to the Antarctic to witness the melting ice caps and stranded polar bears in the hope that their response will alert and enlighten the public. The disintegrating flowers were a poetic evocation of our own planet’s struggle for equilibrium. But ‘Blossom’ also harnessed Clare’s sadness at the loss of centuries of craft tradition: women, often outworkers –retired ladies or nursing mums – have traditionally made these porcelain blooms, at home and in the factory, the most experienced of them turning out up to 500 a day.

‘The tools the ladies use to make the flowers are so personal. On one you can see it was a comb, another used a tea strainer. Thumb marks are visible; the veins of the hands that replicate the veining of a rose. Beause they are unfired and unpainted, these marks are more visible. I would ask the horticulturalists, who helped me to plant them, if they recognised the flowers (there were several types of flower used) and they said yes, but there’s a twist. And it seems the ladies who manufacture them personalise them slightly. They are all different. You can imagine one of them saying "oh, that’s Janice’s flower," because of a particular mark. And they have passed these skills on, one to the other, for more than a hundred years. Part of the lament of this project was the death of that skill. People don’t buy baskets of porcelain flowers any more. There just isn’t the demand. But for a short time, there they were, all these flowers, put on a site by Cape Farewell Trust because we are losing things we are sad about – polar bears and hand made flowers!’

Where do the ideas come from? ‘It’s a really long process,’ she says. ‘It took two years to come up with the Wedgewood bluebirds. Ideas don’t just appear. I fiddle with them and hold them in my brain for a very long time. And when they’re site specific you need a lot of time on site to figure out that you are getting it right. I need to know the objects I’m using will work.’

‘I am not an inventor. I find or design the objects then I reissue them in a different guise. I didn’t invent the flowers or the bluebird. I know the appropriate language and play with materials and space to create an experience. The flowers? That’s everyone else’s skill. My craft training allows me to use their skill with authenticity.’

‘I feel so lucky that I’m able to make this work. It’s only in this time that I’m allowed to do this. Would I have been able to have worked like this 50 years ago? I doubt it. It’s amazing that galleries can make this happen - that the Arts Council, that Cape Farewell is fostering this dialogue. And I’m able to make new work.’

Clare’s next project is a work she’s making for a major new Jerwood exhibition featuring contemporary makers (applied artists), for the first time. Clare’s piece will be exploring the idea of touch, and she’s hoping to create a vertical wall of Wedgewood blue dust which visitors will be able to feel and even manipulate.
‘To make this work for the Jerwood is amazing. It’s the radical Jerwood. And I’m inviting artists and craftspeople to come to the Jerwood Space and talk to each other about material and process. It’s getting people to connect – or not connect. I’m really excited about that.'

What is the most important thing that you would like to impart to new and emerging artists? ‘(The idea) that everything is possible and relevant now! To encourage them to find a route to make work, to keep making work and adding to this rich and changing culture of craft and making. It is vital to encourage the (craft) sector to embrace an intelligent, expansive making criteria, for craft to develop and be relevant.’

For further information on Clare and her work, go to www.claretwomey.com

The Jerwood Contemporary Makers exhibition is at the Jerwood Space, 171 Union Street, London SE1 from June 4th to July 20th. www.jerwood.org