Yesterday I took a trip down to Victoria and Albert Museum in London. I spent a rare afternoon looking at the vast ceramics collection they have on the 6th floor. It made me sad that there were only a handful of people who had made a point of getting up there when it was packed in the shop on the ground floor.
I was trying to pick out making and decorating techniques used in british figurative ceramics in order to inspire me on my latest most ambitious landscape only piece. The collections are arranged in types of ware large pieces stand at the back decending to the tiny at the front. En masse the effect is visually overwhelming ( in a good way) .
I think most people who don't have an unhealthy obsession with these antiquated figurines would expect rows of traditional ladies with a baskets of sickly puppies but you would be very suprised what goes on up there. Sex, domestic violence, distain, indifference and melancholy are played out amongst the fine porcelain blooms. One piece showed a woman stabbing her husband in the head, all the more macabre by the meek smiles of static onlookers. I became drawn in and mesmerised by some British 17 century figures of Italian Commedia dell'arte figures leaping around the cabinets. I was struck by how contemporary they look, their expressions like the gurns and goons we post up on facebook of our friends after a good night out or how clever we think we are when we dress up at a festival.
Finding these objects has given me hours of thinking and I have no idea how or if they will help me manefest some new work. I do know that they are a choice ingredient to add to what is rumbling churning and swirling around in my highly confused brain right now. Oh that's why I was The Scream
