This exhibition is dedicated to the memory of Keith Shantz, who would have been puzzled by many of the works included here. I miss his questions, some of which I have tried to answer with this exhibition and catalogue. His enthusiasm for people who work with their hands, and for the concept of the Canadian Clay and Glass Gallery, makes it possible for us to stand in the Winifred and Keith Shantz Gallery to view this exhibition. I remember him with gratitude and pleasure.
Acknowledgements:
I would like to thank the artists who have responded to this exhibition with enthusiasm, thoughtful submissions and generosity in shipping their works to the Gallery. The Canadian Clay and Glass Gallery receives no public funding for its programming. Therefore, in the same pioneering spirit which brought this Gallery into existence, it is a combination of the artists' goodwill, very generous donors, Board support, and staff and volunteer hard work which have made this exhibition possible.
I am especially indebted to Winifred Shantz for her friendship in times of need. Her spirited company makes volunteer work a pleasure.
A very special thank you goes to William Nassau whose beautiful photographs have brought the artists' artwork to life. His enthusiasm for glass and clay is unlimited. His gift of volunteer time is inestimable and it is a joy to work with him.
No cultural institution can survive without community support. We hope that you will explore the ideas and concepts in this exhibition with your family and friends and return again.
Ann Roberts, Guest Curator, Waterloo, Ontario. January 18, 1994
Foreword:
With the passing of years the programming of the Canadian Clay & Glass Gallery will continue to expand and the exhibitions will be varied. As a national institution we will attempt to deal with issues that concern clay, glass, stained glass and enamel artists and also the broader visual arts community. We will endeavour to act as a bridge to the general public, students, connoisseurs and those doing scholarly research.
It is with great pleasure that the Gallery presents "Containment: The Space Within", guest curated by Ann Roberts, Ontario. Many special thanks must be extended to her, William Nassau and Winifred Shantz for presenting such a fine and challenging exhibition.
As stated in Robert's essay, artists, critics and writers alike have been rethinking the history of clay and glass. They have either reaffirmed the historical context or have been re-addressing their media within the context of contemporary visual arts concerns.
I hope that Ann Robert's comments and the statements of the 77 artists who are participating in "Containment: The Space Within" will broaden your knowledge, allow you to participate in the dialogue and let you leave with a better understanding of the clay and glass arts.
Suzanne E. Greening
Director
Canadian Clay & Glass Gallery
CONTAINMENT: THE SPACE WITHIN
An exhibition of clay and glass art at the Canadian Clay & Glass Gallery
Curated by Ann Roberts
The history of clay and glass began with the need to make containers for food, personal wealth, ritual objects and human remains. The contemporary artists who were invited to exhibit in this exhibition were chosen either for the expressive stretch which they are known to give to their materials or for the manner in which the interior space informs their exterior forms. Some have widened this to include ideas about metaphysical and conceptual containment. Whether functional or sculptural, closed or open, the outward push of an enveloping clay or glass wall holds the promise of containment.
The works in this exhibition have been created by artists with a diversity of backgrounds and experience. Some have been working within Canada's changing art world during the last three decades. Others are neophytes. They work in towns and cities that represent Canada's geographical stretch across our North American continent. Some have consciously made their decision to nestle within the comfort of the craft community and call themselves craftspeople, or designer-craftspeople, others live dangerously in the contemporary art scene. Their decision is usually predicated by the friends with whom they associate and the reception their work has received from art galleries and curators. The Canadian Clay and Glass Gallery's mandate is to bring them together, to create a dialogue and possibly to help others to understand the issues which clay and glass artists face in the 1990's. While the artists were selected based on their previous work, the work that they have sent in response to our invitation is of their own choosing.
For the designer-craftsperson the function and acceptance of the object is of prime importance. Its existence is based on its utility and the ergonomic pleasure of its form. Hold a fragile bowl within your palms. Gaze inside an open form. Place an object within a container made specifically for that object. Or feel with a vulnerable hand the unseen interior. These are tactile experiences which feed a virile mind and are the concerns which inform the intent of the works in this exhibition. Call them artists or craftspeople, their objects have been made as individual expressions in the concentrated minds of makers engaged in conceptualising containment.
Excerpts from Herbert Reid's essays on The Meaning of Art are frequently quoted by ceramists. His inclusion of pottery within a discourse on art is balm to their sense of ostracism from the world of contemporary art today. Writing in the early 1930's when abstract art was at the height of fashion, he states:
"Pottery is at once the simplest and the most difficult of all arts. It is the simplest because it is the most elemental; it is the most difficult because it is the most abstract...before man could write, before he had literature or even a religion, he had this art, and the vessels then made can still move us by their expressive form...when the wheel was invented, and the potter could add rhythm and uprising movement to his concepts of form, then all the essentials of this most abstract art were present. ...A Greek vase is static harmony, but the Chinese vase, when once it had freed itself from the imposed influences of other cultures and other techniques, achieves dynamic harmony; it is not only a relation of numbers, but also a living movement. Not a crystal but a flower..."
The expressive quality of plastic clay which fascinated Read was also central to the beginning of Canada's contemporary clay and glass activity. At the end of the second world war, a Japanese philosopher Soetsu Yanagi, set out to collect and promote the traditional folk crafts of Japan and their source in Korean village pottery. His friend Bernard Leach later published a selection of Yanagi's extensive writings in a book titled The Unknown Craftsman in which he explains the Zen-Buddhist concept of beauty thus:
"The spirit of poverty, as revealed in the world of beauty, is what we call shibusa; it is the humility that may be described as subdued, austere, and restrained, and the "poverty" itself as plain, simple and serene. The old Tea masters found the truest beauty in folkcraft because these objects, being simple and unpretentious, partook automatically of the virtues of poverty. Shibusa expresses the beauty of poverty: objects that fail to express it are not fit to be good Tea-bowls. The deepest beauty is suggestive of infinite potentiality rather than being merely explanatory... All works of art, it may be said, are more beautiful when they suggest something beyond themselves than when they end up being merely what they are" (2)
That last sentence could have been written to describe Tam Irving's celadon pots made in 1993 for this exhibition. The lineage runs straight and true. They are not copies but direct relatives. Irving lives in Vancouver and has visited Asia. He also learnt his pottery in the Leach tradition. Bernard Leach took Yanagi's oriental aesthetic to England, and later to North America through his traveling workshops and his The Potter's Book. This book was for years the only text for potters. Throughout the 1940's and 1950's Canadian and British teachers and critics used it as their own standard for ceramic evaluation. In the chapter, Towards a Standard, he wrote:
...the form of the pot is of the first importance, and the first thing we must look for is,...proper adaptation to use and suitability to material. Without these we cannot expect to find beauty in any of its modes, nobility, austerity, strength, breadth, subtlety, warmth - qualities which apply equally to our judgements of human and ceramic values...not only must the pattern be good in itself and freely executed, but it must combine with and improve the form and harmonise with the natural variations of both colour and texture of body and glaze. (3)
Canadian clay and glass designer-craftspersons, whether they are conscious of the source or not, continue to pursue their search for beauty through this anglo-oriental concept of the simple, humble, vessel with harmonious decoration, in unity with the human body. The work of Sam Uhlick epitomises the Yanagi-Leach tradition. He may live in Saskatchewan but his forms are English and his glazes oriental. His jugs speak to us of timeless throwing rhythms and a constant regard for the melding of decoration and form to function. The owners of his work use then in their daily lives and acknowledge the tradition that binds them to the village potters of bygone generations.
Robert Held is acknowledged to be the instigator of contemporary studio glass in Canada. (4) He trained as a potter in California before immigrating to Canada and switching to glassblowing in 1968. Many of his students at Sheridan College, and his colleagues at Skookum Art Glass in Alberta and later in Vancouver also adhere to the traditions espoused by Leach. The work of Ed Roman, Daniel Crichton and Toan Klein in this exhibition, speak strongly of the weight of glass materials and the trapped fragments of colour which change as the interior air pushes the skin of molten glass outward. Held not only brought the Leach truth-to-materials aesthetic to Canada but he brought California's uninhibited 1960's freedom of expression.
American art during the post war period was a power house of abstract expressionism which released a chain reaction around the world. It effected every art form including clay and glass. Peter Voulkos and Dale Chihuly came rolling out of the Western United States and changed forever our safe and gentle craft world. Yanagi without identifying Peter Voulkos specifically, although the inference is implicit, makes reference to this dramatic swing in craft aesthetics:
"Recently, in the world of art, there has been apparent a remarkable tendency to attach importance to deformation. Now. although I am not personally drawn to works in which distortion is purposely attempted, I believe that truly beautiful objects usually contain in them some element of irregularity. From that point of view, it might be maintained that the grotesque is an essential ingredient of true art. An age that will tolerate grotesque art is usually a great age - but this grotesqueness must be rooted in inevitability; if contrived or strained, it can result only in unwholesomeness. True grotesque art must be healthy; conversely, sentimental art can never be great art" (5)
Laura Donefer is a contemporary glass artist whose earlier work espoused this aesthetic and, together with Francois Houde and other Ontario College of Art students, she exhibited under the name of Dangerous Art in 1986. The feminist emotion in her Witchpot is hers but the precedent for it comes in part through the early clay connection to the glass community, and in part from the anti-aesthetic freedom of our Postmodern culture in which women have found their voice. Barbara Tipton, in defacing and battering her teapots, suggests to the viewer, both the "accident" inherent in claywork and women's rejection of domesticity.
Rose Slivka wrote in 1961 of this New Ceramic Presence which had emerged from California led by the expressionist clay work of Peter Volkous and Chihuly (who later converted from clay to glass) as being akin to the painting of the period:
More than in any other form of art, there is a tradition of the "accident" in ceramics - the unpremeditated, fortuitous event that may take place out of the potter's control, in the interaction between the living forces of clay and fire that may exercise mysterious wills of their own. The fact that the validity of the "accident' is a conscious precept in modern printing and sculpture is a vital link between the practice of pottery and the fine arts today. By giving the inherent nature of the material greater freedom to assert its possibilities - possibilities generated by the individual, personal quality of the artist's specific handling - the artist underscores the multiplicity of life (the life of materials and
his own), the events and changes that take place during his creative act. (7)
Canada benefited enormously from these stylistic and aesthetic changes south of our borders. The politics of the United States and its military action in Vietnam sent many artists north to shelter from the draft. Others came to fill positions in the rapidly expanding universities and colleges. Their lively enthusiasm for clay and glass and the freedom with which they handled these media attracted Canadian artists to experiment with ceramic materials too.
The clay craftspeople were not totally enamoured by the arrival of the likes of performance artists Gathie Falk and Glen Lewis into their world. A stunned audience of Toronto potters who had turned out to their annual visiting-artist workshop, toting their note books to take down glaze formulas, found themselves with paper bags over their heads making clay blobs on the floor with Glen Lewis. A split began between those who followed the artists into the art galleries and those who looked to the legacy of Yanagi and Leach in their search for enlightenment within the crafts community. Others have grazed happily on both sides of the fence.
In the 1980's as Canadian art galleries tightened what they perceived to be the boundaries between high art and the minor or lesser arts of clay and glass, some vessel makers were developing the Super Object which Garth Clark describes, in 1978, as:
"...identified by its decadent use of craft, extravagant lustre surfaces, trompe-l'oeil china painting, and soft-core surrealist imagery. The objects are elegant and tightly controlled, suppressing most of the expressionist qualities of ceramic processes and materials. The Super Object is not a new genre at all. It is a cyclical visitor. It arrives whenever the ceramist has lost a sense of his roots and has taken refuge in technical achievement." (8)
The Super Object was a child of Funk and Pop Art and, with the hindsight of the 1990's, it can now be read not as Clark's demon signifier of decadence, but as a portent of postmodernism's fascination with memory. Mark Cheetham writes of this phenomenon:
"We have in the recent past been witnessing significantly new artistic deployments of memory in our culture...Three interwoven central themes of memory and the postmodern: the relation to art's history, the construction of the subject, and the social uses of memory." (9)
Kinichi Shigeno's high-heel teapot in this exhibition is a memory of his Japanese ceramic art history, a commentary on western society, and the humour of Funk in a redressing of the notion of function.
In Europe, the Bauhaus form follows function aesthetic and Scandinavian design gave way to a different form: the Vessel as Object or the Vessel as Metaphor. Today this has become a major force in Canadian clay and glass work. Artists who wish to make an individual statement from within the craft community, are exploring the possibilities of using functional forms as a vehicle for commenting both on the history of their media and on the concept of function.
Painters have for centuries used self-referential content. They have reworked other artists' themes and borrowed from art history to paint about painting. The postmodern period has added the use of collaged disparate images and styles that produce a personal memory or narrative.
There are vessels in this exhibition which use recognisable forms such as teapot, covered jar or cup, but their function is optional. Their makers are concerned with the concept of spout and handle, container or the act of drinking and the dialogue is with the variation in perception of the object. The added attraction of their possible use is not as important to the maker as the opportunity to comment on the nature of utilitarian objects which were previously known for their function alone.
The works in this exhibition have been brought together to inform the viewer of the joy inherent in the plasticity of clay and glass. The exhibition was not intended to address either surface decoration or sculpture. However the space a hand explores within a form during its making, and which is intimately known to the potter or clay sculptor, is also an inner space to focus the mind. Joan Bruneau fashions her cups so that when you sip your tea from their yellow interiors, your nose is veritably inside a full blown flower. It is no accident that the sensation is erotic. The glaze colouration and the ritual of use are added attributes of the ceramic arts. The lines between function, ritual sculpture and the decorative arts blur.
A glass blower at work similarly uses the interior space to inform the outer shell and a multiplicity of ideas come forth. Other glass artists embed images and objects into solid cast glass. For Carole Pilon the glass is a core within a fibrous vegetative form, pushing the crust aside. Lisette Savaria stretches her porcelain to evoke the sensual flowering or unfurling gestures of nature. In contrast to her paper thin clay, Gilbert Poissant pulls forth memories of buried containers and ancient rituals. His earthy clay adds weight and meaning to the piece.
Enamel and stained glass were thought in Medieval times to have the holy capacity to capture and reflect the light of heaven within their surfaces. While Robert Brown's stained glass panel may reflect heaven's light, it is of earthly containment and bondage that his lead lines tell. For enamellist Francoise Cote-Frico the metal surface is recycled kitchen appliance parts and the image is of an urban drama.
This exhibition has given some of Canada's clay and glass artists a chance to demonstrate their use of interior space and the concept of containment. For the viewer I hope there will be a new awareness of the content and context that motivates our contemporary Canadian clay and glass artists. Peter Dormer in his book The New Ceramics, sums up the contemporary dilemma:
"People, I suggest, either want more symbolism and more figuration in their pottery, or they want the absolute reverse - an obvious pot-like pot..."
Endnotes
1. Read, Herbert, The Meaning of Art, London: Faber & Faber, 1931, p. 41.
2. Yanagi, Soetsu, The Unknown Craftsman, New York: Kodansha Int.l, 1972, p. 50.
3. Leach, Bernard, The Potter's Book. London: Faber & Faber 1940, pp. 19-20.
4. Morrison, Rosalyn ~, The New Canadian Context, New Work magazine no36, 1989, p. 24. Also Canadian Glassworks 1970-1990, Ontario
Craft Council, Toronto.
5.Yanagi, Soetsu, The Unknown Craftsman New York: Kodansha Int. 1972, p. 50.
6. Owens, Craig, The Discourse of Others: Feminists and Postmodernism from The Anti-Aesthetic, essays on postmodern culture edited by Hal Foster. Washington: Bay Press 1983, pp. 57-77.
7. Slivka, Rose, Craft Horizons magazine no4, 1961.
8. Clark, Garth, Introduction: The Search for Context, Ceramic Art: Comment and Review 1882-7 977, New York: Dutton 1978, p. xviii.
9. Cheetham, Mark A, & Hutcheon, Linda. Remembering Postmodernism Toronto: Oxford 1991, p. ix.
10. Dormer, Peter, The New Ceramics London: Thames & Hudson 1986, p. 26.
