Exhibition

Feet of Clay: Contemporary Ceramics

10 Sep 2022 – 29 Oct 2022

Regular hours

Monday
Closed
Tuesday
10:30 – 17:00
Wednesday
10:30 – 17:00
Thursday
10:30 – 17:00
Friday
10:30 – 17:00
Saturday
10:30 – 17:00
Sunday
10:30 – 17:00

Free admission

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Kestle Barton

Helston
England, United Kingdom

Event map

Clay plays an integral part in origin myths all over the world. Some of the artworks in this exhibition, all of which are new, are inspired by the cultures of humans, others by non-humans, and include recycled materials and living organisms as well as clay itself.

About

Clay's tactility offers its own explanation for this: when wet, it is soft as flesh; when dried, it is as hard or as brittle as bones. It can survive intact for hundreds and thousands of years, recording the skills of potters, the introduction of new technologies, and the organisation of societies. 

Humans have developed sophisticated methods of extracting clay from the ground, and with the growth of global distribution networks it has found its way into products as diverse as tiles, paper, pills, paint, insulation and toothpaste. These uses have shaped landscapes, including Cornwall’s clay country, where deep valleys have been quarried and high mountains of waste have been constructed. As we begin to make more direct connections between the causes and effects of human interactions with materials and the ecologies that produced them, clay offers a direct example of the removal of matter from one location to so many others across the planet in ways that are at once necessary and extractive.

Like the origins of the title of this exhibition, Feet of Clay - a dream described in the Old Testament - we are discovering that the systems we have become reliant on have been built on brittle foundations, and our belief that we are separate from nature - that we ourselves do not have feet of clay - is equally illusory. 

Some of the artworks in this exhibition, all of which are new, are inspired by the cultures of humans, others by non-humans, and include recycled materials and living organisms as well as clay itself. Crucially, rather than observing from afar, they position the human body as embedded inside of and implicated in the use and impact of this material - they are forms that nourish, protect growth, collect waste, offer repose and record gestures. Together, they meditate on the tension between the negative spaces of mines and quarries and the positive act of creating that is made possible as a result of this displacement.

Saelia Aparicio works in a wide variety of media, from wall drawings to videos, sculptures and furniture. Originating in a fascination with the sculptural forms of medical instruments, they often create objects and installations that pierce surfaces, suggesting inner worlds and complex systems that are not otherwise immediately apparent.

Simon Bayliss is an artist and music producer based in St Ives, Cornwall, UK. Trained as a painter and then as a potter, he works mainly in slipware ceramics, dance music and video, with occasional forays into poetry and performance. Born in Wolverhampton in 1984, he was raised in Andros, Bahamas, then East Devon, UK and has been living in Cornwall most of his adult life. Bayliss currently has artworks on display in Modern Conversations, Tate St Ives, Trading Station: How hot drinks shape our lives, Manchester Art Gallery – acquired for the public collection through The Manchester Contemporary Art Fund – and at Chandos Place St Austell, part of the Whitegold Ceramics Trail, in conjunction with Austell Project.


Brickfield is a love letter to the heritage art of Cornish brick making. (Anna Francis, Use and Ornament: A Manual for Recovery through Pottery and Ceramics’, 2021) Brickfield is an outdoor community brickworks based in a disused china clay pit, Blackpool, near St Austell. It draws on the history and heritage of brick making in clay country, using locally-sourced waste materials from the china clay industry to engage people in learning how to make bricks by hand, and aims to connect people with landscape, labour and heritage. Brickfield was established in 2018 by Rosanna Martin and Dr Katie Bunnell, and set up on site in 2019. In 2019 and 2020 they collaborated with expert brick maker John Osborne, the last man to fire the last working beehive kiln in Cornwall in 1971. The collaboration resulted in the construction of a mini beehive kiln on-site, with capacity to fire up to 500 bricks, as well as commissioning a publication, film and series of photographs that aimed to create a record of John's embodied skills and knowledge.

Phoebe Collings-James’ work often eludes linear retellings of stories. Instead, her works function as ‘emotional detritus’: they speak of knowledges of feelings, the debris of violence, language and desire which are inherent to living and surviving within hostile environments. Recent works have been dealing with the object as subject, giving life and tension to ceramic forms.

Rosanna Martin is an artist making works in and about Cornwall. Her work holds an aura of natural geology, but its focus is firmly on human invention and intervention; on humanalia (a strange and broad catalogue of things made by people that consequently exist only on earth) and on small scale acts of production and creation. (Edited from a text written by Fieldnotes) In 2022, Rosanna opened the new ceramic studio at CAST, Helston, and in 2017 she founded Brickworks in Penryn, and in 2019 became the lead artist on Brickfield, an experimental, participatory Brickworks set in a disused china clay extraction quarry near St Austell.

Attua Aparicio Torinos is a multidisciplinary artist working in the intersection of design, craft and art. Her practice is driven by material research and direct experimentation, and she is interested in sustainability, material hybridisation and tactility. Collaborations are a fundamental part of her practice; she co-founded Silo Studio with Oscar Lessing and she also collaborates regularly with her sister, artist Saelia Aparicio.

Curator - Rebecca Lewin
Rebecca Lewin is a curator and writer based in London with an interest in the intersections of art, design and ecology. She is currently working as Senior Curator at the Design Museum, and was previously Curator, Exhibitions and Design at Serpentine, London, where she curated shows including Back to Earth (a group exhibition including Dineo Seshee Bopape, Brian Eno and Carolina Caycedo among others), Formafantasma, Luchita Hurtado, Pierre Huyghe, Ian Cheng, Etel Adnan, DAS INSTITUT, and Martino Gamper. She has worked on public art commissions by Michael Craig-Martin and Bertrand Lavier, the 2018 Serpentine Pavilion by Frida Escobedo, and the 2013 Serpentine Pavilion by Sou Fujimoto.

She has also produced independent exhibitions, including A Partition; at Cell Project Space (2016), The Palace of Green Porcelain at Breese Little Gallery (2013) and Pertaining to things natural… at the Chelsea Physic Garden (2012).

She has contributed catalogue essays to Serpentine publications on Formafantasma, Cao Fei (with Joseph Constable), Lucy Raven and DAS INSTITUT. Three contributions to the Phaidon publication Vitamin C were published in 2018, and contributed interviews with Formafantasma for TLmag, Salvatore Arancio for Semiose and Allison Katz for Mousse Magazine.

She has been a visiting lecturer at the Royal College of Art, the Design Academy Eindhoven and the London School of Architecture.

What to expect? Toggle

CuratorsToggle

Rebecca Lewin

Exhibiting artistsToggle

Simon Bayliss

Attua Aparicio Torinos

Phoebe Collings-James

Saelia Aparicio

Rosanna Martin

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