-
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
-
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.In Powell and Pressburger’s 1946 film A Matter of Life and Death, David Niven’s character, a World War II fighter pilot, bails out of his burning Lancaster bomber without a parachute. He lands on a familiar shore, seemingly well. However, he soon discovers that he is neither alive nor dead and is having to bargain for life in a space somewhere between Heaven and Earth.
Lucio Fontana arrived in Italy from Argentina as young child in 1905, at the start of a 25-year sequence of devastating earthquakes that ravaged much of the country. This catastrophic, elemental disruption has been widely acknowledged as having considerable bearing on the eruptive quality of Fontana’s early sculptures in clay - a material he loved for its organic malleability and sensual characteristics. He worked rapidly in an improvised way, creating sculptures that held movement and gesture whilst also generating a sensation of light and space, referring to them as ‘terremotata ma ferma’ (‘earthquaked but motionless’).
Fontana understood the existence of an uncertain state amid being and not, knowing very well that the properties and processes of clay are precarious. Earth, moisture, temperature and air create change when they collide - either by accident or design - causing the transformation from one state to another, and provoking an incalculable space between fragility and strength. To puncture a painting is often considered an outrage - to puncture a ceramic is a necessity to prevent an explosion.
-
-
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 Lord makes sculptures from clay that face catastrophe head-on. The physicality of their creation is embodied in their material and form; with titles such as Breathing, Holding, Biting, Swallowing, Lord’s work is a boldly defiant corporal presence. In contrast to his grounded, earthly forms, the wall-mounted circles of clay swallows and artichokes possess an ephemeral quality, alluding to seasonal comings and goings and nature’s cyclical patterns of death and renewal. Any damage caused by the volatile making process is repaired and patched with gold, in an act that acknowledges both a history of clay and the damaged perfection of the sculpture itself.
-
Andrew LordCircle of sixteen swallows, 2019ceramic, string, gold-leafed hook, epoxy, gold leaf340 x 340 cm.
134 x 134 in. -
-
-
The delicacy and mutability of unfired clay are qualities exploited by Phoebe Cummings. Masterfully crafted, like a Dutch still life painting or a Grinling Gibbons wood carving, her abundant arrangements of nature’s sumptuous bounties take on a transient, almost terrible beauty. Built of raw clay, directly onto an interior wall and upon the terrace of the building in Naples, the life-span of her ‘fountain’ and ‘candle sconce’ will be at the mercy of the air, sun and water, left to change over time and to return back to dust.
Phoebe Cummings
Untitled (sconce), 2022
clay, wire, wood
147 x 60 x 32 cm.
58 x 23 1/2 x 12 1/2 in. -
-
-
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. -
-
Chiara CamoniVasi Faralla (#06, #09, #11), 2020
stoneware, glaze with flower ash
dimensions variable
-
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.
-
Chiara Camoni
Vasi Farfalla (Tante manine, Farfalla fiore, Babolo), 2021
stoneware galzed with flowers' ash, garden's soil, river's sand
dimensions variable
-
-
-
Serena Korda
And She Cried Me a River, 2021
stoneware, unglazed stoneware, natural hemp rope
dimensions variable
-
-
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.
-
-
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.
To the rhythm of the moon the tidal force of the sea transforms rock into pebbles, pebbles into sand, and sand into dust. With heat, sand melts to form glass, while with moisture, dust becomes clay. Masaomi Yasunaga’s objects gather the forces of erosion and with clay glaze, pebbles, glass and ash: at one time adding the ashes of his grandmother, he creates mysterious structures. These improbable, vessel-like forms are further transformed by burial and firing in sand, earth or under stone; a very physical process that impresses a resilient, timeless quality onto the objects whilst bringing them dangerously close to disintegration.
-
-
-
-
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.
-
Keith Harrison
Resistor, 2001
digital copy of DV film
2 minutes 40 seconds
edition of 3 + 2AP
-
-
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.
-
-
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.
-
-
-
-
-
-
Clay is everywhere in Naples. Places of worship are paved with terracotta more often than with marble. Rooves of ancient buildings are tiled in slabs of fired red clay. The city and its museums are bursting with archaeological, anthropological and architectural ceramic wonders, and in nearby Herculaneum there are earthenware drainpipes, cooking pots and amphorae that survived the devastating volcanic eruption of 79 AD. In their different manifestations of clay these artifacts tell stories, passed down through time. Although he is not from Naples, Leoncillo Leonardi’s ceramic works feel very much at home in this city. His colourful, glazed figures celebrate society, labour and common-lore myths. A near contemporary of Lucio Fontana, Leoncillo also sought to use clay as abstract matter, exploiting its earthly appearance and changeability to convey tragedy and human suffering. Markings, like words from an unknown script, are sometimes drawn with a glaze the colour of molten lava across the surface of the darkly fired clay.
Leoncillo LeonardiCariatide, 1945glazed ceramic, two faced82 x 18 x 18 cm.
32 1/2 x 7 1/2 x 7 1/2 in. -
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.
-
-
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. -
-
-
-
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.
-
-
Phillip King
Head, 1996
ceramic
50 x 45 x 45 cm.
19 3/4 x 17 3/4 x 17 3/4 in.
-
-
-
-
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.
-
-
-
-
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.
- LIST OF WORKS
- PRESS RELEASE ENG
- PRESS RELEASE ITA
- Jenni Lomax's Text: A Matter of Life and Death ITA
-
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
