Felicity Ayleiff in conversation with curator Ann Elliott

About

17 September to 23 November 2007
Lobby, One Canada Square, Canary Wharf
London E14 5AB

Monday to Friday 5.30am'midnight
Saturday &Sunday 7.00am'11.30pm

'It's Friday the 4th August [2006] and I've arrived in Jingdezhen! In fact I've been here for 3 days now in blistering heat. I'm not sure whether it's the heat that is making me sleepy or jet lag. I had forgotten just how crazy this place is; it's like being in the Wild West! It's speedy, chaotic, full of energy, which is what I'm going to need a great deal of! I've just begun to realise the enormity of this project.'

Felicity Aylieff's first words in the written and visual diary she made throughout her four-month sabbatical from the Royal College of Art in 2006 ring true a year later when, in China again, she has completed and dispatched to Britain twelve large ceramics, the largest of which reach a height of three metres.
Never having worked on such a scale before, Aylieff was fortunate in being invited to be artist in residence at the Pottery Workshop Experimental Factory in Jingdezhen that made connections for her to work with a family business specialising in making 'Big Ware', enormous traditionally-formed and decorated porcelain vases. Not used to straying from the traditional form of a Chinese urn, the technicians enjoyed the challenge as much as Felicity enjoyed the change to her tried and tested way of working.
This conversation between artist and curator, begun in China, documents the creative journey and continues here among the finished pieces, shown for the first time in the Lobby of One Canada Square. After Canary Wharf, the exhibition will travel to Gallery Oldham in February 2008, the first venue of a short tour.
The Sculpture in the Workplace exhibition programme in the Lobby of One Canada Square and Jubilee Park is curated for CWG by Ann Elliott. Past exhibitors include Dan Graham, Eilis O'Connell, Keir Smith, Lynn Chadwick, Laura Ford, Charles Hewlings, Ivor Abrahams, Phyllida Barlow, Franz West, Keith Wilson, and Andrew Sabin.