Can pottery be an eco-friendly artform?
Exhibition features artists seeking to tread more lightly on the planet
Opening this weekend at the Hatton Gallery is an exhibition called Sustainable Clay which features the work of 12 contemporary artists and some who have gone before. Humans have been getting their hands mucky with clay for a very long time.
It was the idea of Matthew Jarratt, independent curator and visiting professor of creative practice at Newcastle University, who had heard artists talking more frequently and with greater urgency about sustainability.
He had also attended a talk on sustainable ceramics by Dr Wendy Gers, a campaigning Dutch ceramicist and academic for whom it has long been a hot topic.
Of the dozen living contributors to Sustainable Clay at the Hatton, all with North East links, he says: “I’ve worked with many of these artists in the past and was interested in how some were sourcing local clay, others were looking at more sustainable kilns to fire their pieces – or indeed not firing them at all – and others are using their ceramic skills to work with alternative materials which may be recycled.”
On the scale of environmental harm none of these artists will even register alongside the commercial producers churning out cheap crockery aimed at a throwaway society.
But if influencing human behaviour is key to a more sustainable future, then they have a role to play, as this exhibition demonstrates.
Its title is as much provocation as description with the exhibits raising lots of questions about methods of production. Just how sustainable is an artistic practice involving a finite natural resource and prolonged blasts of heat?
And how to define sustainability anyway? Newcastle University fine art graduate Bethany Stead, a young artist starting out, suggests that sustaining a fragile career in order to sustain a living has to be part of the sustainability equation.
For someone like her, using recycled glazes and reclaimed clay, as she did in her new piece for this show, Slipped, owes more to necessity than anything else, even if the end product is pleasing.
But in making one of the elements of another of her pieces, the rather startling Open Eyed Dreams, she had fired the ‘coffin’ base only once (a so-called bisque firing) to create a surface on which she could draw.
“It’s something I want to incorporate into my work a little bit more because it is more environmentally friendly,” she says. “In ceramics the final firing is always the highest temperature.”
And as for using a mix of leftover glazes, who would even know?
Rosie McLachlan, who lives off grid in the north Pennines and uses clay sourced from nearby rivers such as the Eden and South Tyne, creates her distinctive pieces by firing them in an anagama kiln.
Developed in China in the 5th Century and taken up in Japan, it requires ceramic pieces to rest among the burning embers during an intense four-day firing.
For this reason, those in possession of an anagama kiln (anagama meaning ‘cave’ in Japanese) tend to alert others before doing a group firing, although Rosie admits this does result in a fair bit of travel.
She used to go to North Wales for an anagama firing and knows someone else who travels from Sweden.
On the plus side, Rosie says no glazing is required. The burnished appearance of her anagama creations is due to the wood ash melting into them in the kiln to create a natural glaze.
“And because it’s wood-fired I do use ash die-back so I do feel it’s pretty sustainable,” she adds.
Rosie came to ceramics via archaeology, intrigued by pieces she would uncover on digs. Her father was a potter and when he died, she wondered at the absence of pottery from our funerary tradition when it’s so prevalent in other cultures.
Her Hatton exhibits, one called Hunping (‘soul vessel’ in Chinese), are part of her imaginative response.
And if you’re wondering about that local clay, Rosie says she takes it sparingly to blend with bought in supplies and more to evoke a sense of place than for practical purposes.
Wolfgang Wieleder, artist and professor of contemporary sculpture at Newcastle University, has stretched the definition of the word ‘ceramics’ to create a piece which appears to be holding up the gallery ceiling.
Called Column, it is black, blocky and a little off kilter, contrasting with the Edwardian gallery’s smooth neo-classical columns. It’s a metaphor, he says, for changing times and tastes.
It is also an example of double recycling, the original blocks sourced from a Scarborough firm which processed plastic rubbish to make a material useful in drainage, and then taken from an earlier sculpture to form this one.
“Clay is made from very fine sand and dust mixed with water and this is made out of human dust,” says Wolfgang pointing out a conceptual parallel between the two materials.
“It is the clay of the Anthropocene (the epoch in which humans have impacted the planet),” he suggests.
A rather sad footnote to this story is that the Scarborough firm fell victim to a hostile takeover and is no more.
Wolfgang’s other piece, horizontal rather than perpendicular, is called Boat, which he says was inspired by ancient burial vessels, such as that excavated at Sutton Hoo, and comprises carefully stacked rows of ceramic planes.
For him it is a very special piece.
“This is one of the first pieces I ever made and it was in Newcastle where I was an exchange student for half a year.
“In 1992 it was in the first solo show I ever had in my life and it was in that room next door.”
Having been shown around the world, it is now back in its home port and you might think how uncannily those little planes seem to anticipate The Angel of the North in shape, colour and texture.
Arguably the champion of Sustainable Ceramics is Chinese artist Xiang Yang who rescues and polishes up porcelain rejects from Jingdezhen, the 1,000-year-old porcelain centre of China.
These so-called ‘readymades’ are saggy and squashy and useless but still full of beauty and appeal.
Complementary to these modern exhibitors is a room devoted to items from the collections of the Laing and Shipley art galleries run by North East Museums.
Some date from Victorian times and are highly decorated and with pictures of North East landmarks (bridges popular then as now); other, more austere pieces are examples of artist-made studio pottery.
Esmé Whittaker, keeper of art for North East Museums, admits: “We were really keen to talk about the heritage of pottery making in the region but relating it to sustainability was quite tricky.
“But what’s really interesting is that often these factories grew up near a source of clay but there wasn’t a substantial amount of it here.
“That there was an industry here was more to do with the supply of coal and the rivers and coast which were important for export and import.
“The clay and flint used in the production process was used as ballast on the colliers.”
In the North East it didn’t go to waste, instead being repurposed to make some of the items on display in the exhibition.
Sustainable Clay runs at the Hatton Gallery, Newcastle, until May 3. The gallery is open Monday to Saturday, 10am to 5pm (admission free).