White on White
Contemporary Canadian Ceramics
White is the absence of colour, the sum of all colours. It brings to clay meanings both inherent and external to it: the notions of emptiness, purity, simplicity, nakedness, lightness, newness, spirituality, death and transcendence. The artist who chooses to work with these meanings may elaborate on them, abstract from them or confound them. While some artists in this exhibition subscribe to the dictum that a work of art, in Yeats's words, "must not mean but be," others have given their work conceptual impact, examining and reinterpreting cultural understandings and art-historical theory.
The Impossible Whiteness of White
Diane Nasr says, "You should call this exhibition,'Try and get white" In expressing both her frustration and determination. Nasr joins her ceramic ancestors in the struggle to realize something that satisfies one's visual understanding of what white truly is.
During several expansive periods of ceramic history, the quest for a workable, white clay body with a clear or white covering engaged potters in many parts of the world. Porcelain, with its strengths and translucency, was first produced in southern China during the T'ang Dynasty in the late eighth or early ninth century. It took Europeans until the early 18th century to master the difficulties of a porcellanous clay body and the technology of high-fired kilns. Adding a clear glaze to porcelain highlighted its reflective quality and depth.
Throughout ceramic history and in all parts of the world, attempts have been made to produce an attractive covering to make decoration vivid and successful. In Korea in the 15th century, white slips and glazes of ravishing beauty were produced on Punch'ong wares. In Europe slips (liquid clay used as a glaze) tended to give a yellower hue because of trace elements in the clay. In the Islamic world tin oxide was added to a lead glaze, producing a suitable, white covering for decoration on earthenware. This innovation made its way across Europe. In Italy, where these wares are called maiolica, potters added white pigment to the tin glaze, enabling them to produce different shades of white, and to decorate their wares with the sophisticated interplay of white on white, called bianco sopra bianco.
Low-fired wares such as maiolica have had many revivals since those great, early Islamic pots were made, and seem to have been of particular interest in the west following less colourful, non-decorative periods of production. Tin has often been replaced by other materials, and sometimes the glossy, white glaze is not decorated at all, but left exposed over the clay.
The preoccupation with white has never waned. In the 20th century Lucie Rie in England developed a trademark, thick, white glaze for her functional wares, and a forceful, exploding, white glaze for vases. Hans Coper spent virtually his entire life refining, layering and scratching through white glazes. Only rarely did he feel the need to venture beyond an exploration of white tones. Gordon Baldwin and Ewen Henderson have continued this tradition of working almost exclusively in white. In Japan Ryoji Koie uses white in ways that are reminiscent of the traditional, but at the same time are unmistakably contemporary. Junko Kitamura's exquisite white inlay work recalls raked Zen gardens or ancient textiles. The Canadian artists exhibiting here have made their contributions to this white-on-white tradition with porcelains, white glazes and clear glazes of great beauty, with earthenware pieces of dignity and imagination, with natural and architectonic stoneware.
It is sometimes quite easy to see the debt owed to ceramic tradition, such as in the reference to oriental forms in the work of Kayo O'Young and Harlan House. John Chalke's crazed and bubbled surfaces suggest a connection with Oribe ware. Paul Mathieu's use of rhinestones appears to salute the fashion for "jewelling" popular at Sevres in the mid-eighteenth century. Greg Payce's classical forms have an eastern Mediterranean referent, and Nasr's lyrical decoration has an air of rococo whimsy. Léopold Foulem's hare reminds one of the eighteenth century fashion for mold-made ceramic animals and the period's obsession with private menageries.
White for Form's Sake
Speaking of the project he undertook for this exhibition, Bruce Cochrane says. "A monochromatic white surface is something I would never have tried. I like how it reinforces the form and causes the viewer to focus on the structure."
Without the distraction of colour, one considers the outline, the interior space, the proportions and relationships. It becomes, in a sense, architectural, the totality of the object resonating in space. Cochrane's own work dazzles first by virtue of the congeniality of the related parts, and only on second thought points to its meaning as a cruet set.
Bruce Taylor's gigantic saltshaker is a building rich in associations, an austere salt factory terminating in rococo feet. In Greg Payce's garniture,the inner outlines of the three vases become the human profile, the negativespace becomes the two positive portraits and the vases disappear momentarily from notice. Roseline Delisle says of her work, "I conceive the pieces in profile as constructions of triangular elements." Steve Heinemann acknowledges the work of Hans Coper and the Pueblo potters as the inspiration for his exploration of form, layering of slips and glazes, and sgraffito.
Nature to Advantage Dressed
Sadashi Inuzuka is concerned with primitive life-forms in the natural world. His pieces metamorphose, forming cocoons suggesting the possibility that some ancient form of life may eventually emerge from within. Inuzuka explains that his work for White on White is about the transformation into different kinds of white through layering. The pieces were fired eight times. "It is an on-going project and I would like to keep firing up to the point where all texture disappears from the surface of the piece." The surface of Kayo O'Young's teapot suggests molten white lava, momentarily contained but ready to bubble up imminently. John Chalke's surfaces are reminders of the longevity of the earth, of its hidden secrets, only a few of which will ever come to light. Heinemann explains his thin, multi-hued white covering beneath which earth and twigs seem slightly visible: "The way I use white you have a sense of what's below, of other things."
The ability of snow to resculpt the landscape in myriad forms and tones is described by many artists as an inescapable part of their work. Robert Archambeau explains from Winnipeg, "The inspiration for White on White comes out of what I'm looking at right now. It's -45 degrees C. There is the way the crystals form on my window, the melting and reforming of the snow, and the patterning of it. In the same way I put down white slip and get patterns." House has named his luscious glaze xue bai, the Chinese word for white snow. His crackle glaze, March, often trails across the xue bai, heralding the breakup of the winter and the advent of a new season. Ann Roberts describes her piece as "an invocation to the Earth Mother and a piece of the Canadian Landscape...an ice floe, such as the spring breakup hurls down the Grand River," which flows outside her studio.
When Lisette Savaria and François Potvin were working at Sèvres outside Paris, they took a trip in January to Etretat, where Claude Monet lived and painted. "We had a feeling of our space in Canada with the sea, cliffs and pebbles. We started after that visit to elevate our pieces, to look at space and concentrate on the simplicity of pure lines." Ann Mortimer's cup series was first inspired by the exotic protea plant seen on Maui; later pieces in the series resemble a swordfish plant that grows in the volcano's crater. The gentle lustre of Mortimer's flowery teacups belies the slightly menacing effect of the beckoning petal fingers.
White as Symbol
As Diane Nasr explains, in the Far East white is the symbol of death, but death is really about being reborn, white and pure. Her screen is a place where the fragile soul can reside and find privacy. Roberts' table-like slab is "a ritual stone for the presentation of offerings," the cup "a metaphor for the female as container for the continuity of life." Jack Sures says that his piece "fits right in with my ideology of human endeavour." His make-believe creatures, the "bandicoots," are wryly human: truly we, like the emperor, are as naked as they are. Delisle's intentions are more abstract: "My work evolves from the concept of the unity of opposites--black and white, strength and fragility, movement and stillness."
"Earthenware is personal, a gestural kind of material, accessible, you can find it in your backyard. Porcelain is a class act." Walter Ostrom demonstrates this contrast on his piece, Heaven and Earth Vase. Around the lip of the vase are the Chinese characters for heaven and earth. "Heaven" is made in a mold with porcelain. "Earth" is modelled by hand from earthenware.
White in Context
Contemporary work in white has come a long way from the early struggles to obtain a desirable version of white, and the making of precious, fashion-conscious objects for European courts. Jim Thomson looks at the oldest cultural meaning of clay, function itself. Describing his Sleep Woks, he says, "They're dreamy, rather surreal. Pots hold things that we cannot always see or touch. You think of a wok as functional, but these really function when they're just hanging." Taylor's piece brings to mind the contrast between the industrially built and the studio crafted; the labour of many and of one; the exaggeration of importance of a humdrum, domestic object; and the implied suggestiveness of the form: pillar of salt (ossified human being) and the salt mines.
Both Paul Mathieu and Léopold Foulem have distinguished themselves by their examination of ideas about ceramics and culture. Foulem questions our biases about the hierarchical ordering of "fake and real, natural and artificial, hand made and man-made." Standing our unconscious assumptions on their heads, he presents a mold-made piece which can be reproduced with almost the same rapidity that it takes a rabbit to multiply. The uniqueness of his piece is not a matter of the hand-made object, but rather of putting back the hair on the hare.
Mathieu's work immediately undermines taken-for-granted cultural perceptions. His stacked dishes (as in a full sink) are piled off-centre, deliberately skewing one's vision: one is forced to look at them afresh. At the same time as the work is a group of pots, it is also a painter's canvas and a sculpture. Mathieu explains: "My original idea was like Malevich, white square on white. This was my formal starting point, a circle on a circle. Then I included a confrontational sexual subject, a pair of buttocks with some sperm on the cheek. The images are in close relationship with the outlines of the plate. Everything is very subtle, metaphorical; it's not there if you don't know about it."
White Full Circle
White is the bearer of light, and hence life. It is fitting, then, that it should be used for those pots with the longest pedigree--domestic wares, and ritual objects assisting in the passage from death to some undisclosed form of life. In a metaphorical sense, white clay works are attuned to the environment formally and sympathetically. Finally, however, as these marvellously varied and exuberant works show, white turns the spotlight on itself. Plenty of time is needed in order to absorb all the riches of the colour that is white.
Intelligent work in clay demands not only a technical ability and a creative gift, it also includes by necessity an investigation of the ceramic past. As part of the effort to understand the nature and possibilities of clay, the artist has to explore, and in the process pays tribute to, the great traditions of this fundamental and ancient medium. As artists struggle over the course of many years to discover what works well for particular individual intentions, both aesthetic and practical, different aspects of these traditions come to occupy their attention. With fresh, new, ceramic voices they draw on the wealth of their heritage to embolden and expand their work.
The artists in this exhibition have shown the confidence, ability and sensitivity to pay their debt to the past through work and study, but have never been slavishly committed to it. They realize that to try and recreate an object situated at a different point in history will only be a half truth, as its cultural context and vigour have been lost.
They have created richly complex works, exploring ethnographic material, Far Eastern aesthetics and 20th century western art forms. As part of a vibrant ceramics continuum, it is their conviction and their ability to balance the past with the present that propels us into the future.
Susan Jefferies
Anne McPherson
Guest Curators