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A Matter of Life and Death
LYNDA BENGLIS, CHIARA CAMONI, PHOEBE CUMMINGS, LUCIO FONTANA, ANYA GALLACCIO, KEITH HARRISON, PHILLIP KING, SERENA KORDA, LEONCILLO LEONARDI, ANDREW LORD, MAGDALENE ODUNDO, LAWSON OYEKAN, MASAOMI YASUNAGAAn exhibition of works in clay, curated by Jenni Lomax
29 March - 28 May
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Lucio Fontana
Concetto Spaziale, 1955-60
painted terracotta
20 x 25.5 x 18.6 cm.
8 x 10 1/2 x 7 1/2 in. -
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Andrew LordCircle of artichokes, 2019ceramic240 x 240 cm.
94 1/2 x 94 1/2 in. -
Andrew Lord
Juggler with three balls (yellow, orange, blue), 2021
ceramic, steel
190 x 62 x 45 cm.
75 x 24 1/2 x 17 1/2 in. -
Andrew LordCircle of sixteen swallows, 2019ceramic, string, gold-leafed hook, epoxy, gold leaf340 x 340 cm.
134 x 134 in. -
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Phoebe Cummings
Prelude, 2022
clay, wood, steel
200 x 120 x 120 cm.
78 1/2 x 47 1/2 x 47 1/2 in. -
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Chiara CamoniVasi Faralla (#06, #09, #11), 2020
stoneware, glaze with flower ash
dimensions variable
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Chiara Camoni’s Farfalle (butterfly) vases also draw emphasis to the contradictions of nature, contrasting the butterfly’s shimmering allure with its ability to be repellent in order to survive. Her coil-built clay vessels are individually characterised by sculpted reliefs in the form of a moth or butterfly and imbued with the ambiguities of anthropomorphism. There is much camouflage, mirroring and double-take going on, with the objects questioning their own place in the order of things. While they can be seen to function as vases, with flowers and foliage incorporated within their table top display, the objects hold a potent, totemic symbolism, alluding to ritual, folklore and magic.
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Chiara Camoni
Vasi Farfalla (Tante manine, Farfalla fiore, Babolo), 2021
stoneware galzed with flowers' ash, garden's soil, river's sand
dimensions variable
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Serena Korda
And She Cried Me a River, 2021
stoneware, unglazed stoneware, natural hemp rope
dimensions variable
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Other forces are present in Serena Korda’s ‘witch bottles’- part of a series called The Hosts. These bulbous objects expressively await an infusion of breath that will transform them into instruments of sound. When brought together as a ‘jug orchestra’, their individual attributes offer different timbres and intensity of pitch to create unpredictable melodies. Made to “entice the sirens to sing out from the sea”, Korda’s gigantic necklace of ceramic baubles hang, draped across glass doors that open out to a spectacular view of the Bay of Naples. A mermaid’s head, embodied in the necklace, sheds clay tears across a splay of ocean-bed treasures and the unheard noise is palpable.
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Masaomi Yasunaga
Stone Vessel 石の器, 2021
colored glaze, titanium
29 x 29 x 29 cm.
11 1/2 x 11 1/2 x 11 1/2 in.
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The firing procedure is always uncertain. The alchemic changes of state happen out of sight; locked in the intense heat of a kiln or buried under red hot embers. For Keith Harrison this unpredictable and perilous process is a vital component of his performance works using clay. He has made a video of a ceramic firing taking place in the living room of his grandmother’s house. Egyptian clay wrapped around the elements of a small, electric bar heater, spits, glows and crackles while his grandmother is heard in the background, asking him if he would like a cup of tea and something to eat. She seems unconcerned of any threat to her safety or to her furnishings. The tense undercurrent that runs through the normality of this domestic scene receives an additional charge when being watched in such close proximity to Vesuvius.
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Keith Harrison
Resistor, 2001
digital copy of DV film
2 minutes 40 seconds
edition of 3 + 2AP
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A live, performative act of creation, destruction and reclamation brought Anya Gallaccio’s collection of ceramic fragments into existence. Some, in this array of curiously shaped pieces, possess the lustrous and seductive qualities of a geological find but others look grotesquely like bits of charred carcasses. They have been made through a sequence of unpredictable processes, beginning with a durational work called Beautiful Minds. Over a number of weeks, a 3D printing machine, operated by robotic technology, forced extrusions of wet clay to coil and drop onto the gallery floor, in order to form a scaled-down replication of the Devil’s Tower, a mountain in Wyoming. What resulted was an approximate idea of a mountain; a craggy heap , made from layered clay in various stages of hardening and cracking. Eventually it began to break up into randomly shaped lumps that could be easily cut or pulled away from the rest of the mound. Having chosen to preserve a selection of these self-made sculptures, Gallaccio began by firing them industrially, to a biscuit hardness, and then transported them to northern Scotland to an outdoor wood-fired kiln. Successive and lengthy firings with unstable combustible matter gave each piece a texture and patina all of its own.
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Magdalene Odundo has said that committing a sculpture to the kiln is the most stressful part of its making. She knows, like Powell and Pressburger’s hero, that it will have to negotiate that uncertain space between Heaven and Earth and hopes that the heat’s force will provide the means of survival rather than destruction. Shaped by pulling from the central core of the clay and working from the inside out, Odundo’s hollowed forms are visually animated by the containment of air. They seem to inhale and exhale, effecting an illusion of movement on their burnished, oxidated and blackened surfaces - the implied motion is transmittable, inviting a physical response in a reciprocal intake of breath. Her sculptures exist constantly in the present, though it is evident that past lives, knowledge, and long-held beliefs are implicated in both concept and process. This fluid collapsing of time resonates strongly in a city where the sacred blood of its patron saint, San Gennaro, changes state from dust to liquid when fate bodes well.
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Lawson Oyekan
Reciprocity 5x/5, 2017
porcelain
35 x 18 x 17 cm. each
14 x 7 1/2 x 6 1/2 in. -
Lawson Oyekan, at times, incorporates text within his ceramic pieces. Written in English or the language of his parents, Yoruba, the poetic words fuse with the bodily forms in an expression of humanity’s endurance in the face of despair. His pair of tall, standing structures speak to each other of their similarities and differences. Piercings and holes created by overlapping strips of clay adorn Oyekan’s work, liberating the air and allowing the energy to flow freely - back and forth, inside and out.
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Lawson Oyekan
Physics Eternal 1, 2010
kiel earth, clay, fyn earth clay
200.7 x 132 x 90.02 cm.
79 1/2 x 52 x 35 1/2 in. -
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Phillip King released the swollen, off-balance tension of his sculptures by cutting into them and breaking their wholeness. Despite these wounds the ‘vessels’ retain their poise and assume a human stance of vulnerability and resistance. There is an aura of conflict and warrior-like combativeness in King’s ceramic sculptures. In a similar but different way to Masaomi Yasunaga, he compromises the stability and purpose of a vessel by challenging the probability of its base materials. Mixing pulped paper with raw clay is a perilous enough endeavour but it is a risk compounded by making shape-changing penetrations through all sides of the vessels.
In defiance of potential disaster, King’s sculptures adopt classical postures of stoical resistance. Perhaps this sense of endurance is because their unglazed clay ‘bodies’ have the appearance of Portland stone.
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Phillip King
Head, 1996
ceramic
50 x 45 x 45 cm.
19 3/4 x 17 3/4 x 17 3/4 in.
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In contrast, Lynda Benglis’s extruded clay objects are in futuristic flight. Full of glossy fluidness, their gestural swirls illustrate the mechanical force by which they were formed. The works have a definite direction of travel that is held suspended in mid-air - like speed lines in a cartoon animation, drawn to imply that anything might happen next.
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The sense of nascent danger that seems integral to the ceramic works of all these artists is inevitable, given their resilience has been constantly tested by fate and circumstance. It is a feeling heightened by their temporary relocation. In a place whose vibrancy and historic beauty exists despite - and because - of its proximity to an active volcano and a volatile ocean: a city in which people go about their daily tasks and pleasures, walking above catacombs that have skulls and bones of their forebears on open display; where the souls of the recently deceased are prayed for and celebrated on every street corner – here everything is a matter of life and death.
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For exhibition enquiries please contact Federica Sheehan: federica@thomasdanegallery.com
For sales enquiries please contact Devon McCormack: devon@thomasdane.com
For press enquiries please contact Camilla Bove: camilla@thomasdanegallery.com
