‘Peripheries’, including ‘Edges’, Ceramic House, Brighton
Dr Andre Hess
It is crucial that during the trying times we currently find ourselves that we continue with the business of creating cultural capital and bringing into being experiences and objects/things that add value to life. The apprehension of beauty, however we define it, and wherever we find it, is a necessary condition for a civilised life. This house, and the exhibitions set up within it, felt necessary on the sunny Saturday morning I visited as we rage at what currently surrounds and assails us.
This happening was part of ‘Artists Open Houses’ (aoh.org.uk), which ran from 7 – 29 May 2022. The Ceramic House presented a project called Peripheries, as part of a larger project called ‘EDGES’. The event also offered the house itself for exhibition.
Peripheries, as in the eastern and western edges of the European continent, included two artists who work with sound, Linda O’Keeffe and Suzanne Walsh from Ireland, and two artists from Estonia who work with clay, Juss Heinsalu and Pille Kaleviste. These pairs of artists were part of the Artist in Residence program at The Ceramic House. The project’s stated intention involved seeking a collaborative practice amongst the four artists and what that might generate: be they formal coincidences found, ideas, thoughts, and discussion stimulated by their surroundings, geography, the sea shore, and/or local stories. The resulting work was installed in a white-space annexe to the house, also curated by Kay Aplin and Joseph Young.
As part of Peripheries, in the main house, was an exhibition of small ceramic objects by 12 preeminent Estonian ceramicists. These items were placed thoughtfully throughout the house, in bedrooms, on landings, in the kitchen, sitting room, dining room, everywhere. For the record, these artists were: Ingrid Allik, Jarona Ilo, Kadi Hektor, Raili Keiv, Mariana Laan, Kadri Parnamets, Kaie Pungas, Urmas Puhkan, Ene Raud-Magi, Sander Raudsepp. Annika Teder, and Anne Turn.
It is important to note that The Ceramic House is quite an object of art in itself, in which sacrifices were and are made by the occupants in the name of art, art projects, like Artists Open Houses, and other exhibition projects like this. It is worthwhile, therefore, at this point, to discuss the house itself, a powerful presence.
Margaret Duras wrote in ‘Practicalities’, a book of her essays first published in 1987: ‘A house means a family house, a place especially meant for putting children and men in so as to restrict their waywardness and distracting them from longing for adventure and escape they’ve had since time began.’ Less interestingly perhaps, Webster’s defines a house simply as a building that serves as living quarters for one or a few families. That would be the conventional with it conventions. The Ceramic House, and the ‘woman of the house’, sits in utter opposition to both extremes of the definitions of a house. That Webster’s definition including fashions for colour and furnishings, currently shades of grey for walls, various coffee colours called cappuccino, latte, etc. for soft furnishings, and feature-walls of bold wallpaper designs, often inspired by the Tropical or the Savannah.
Kay Aplin and Joseph Young, but especially Aplin, I suspect, is the maker and curator of the ceramic aspect of Ceramic House. It is a large end-of-terrace Brighton property, much of which is covered in glazed tiles made by Aplin herself. These are applied to the outside walls, surrounding wall, and much of the interior.
The house and its grounds have become a visually interesting and psychologically intense environment.
One of the possible ways in which to consider the house, and the default passer-by might indeed think it so, is that it is the product of an ‘outsider’ artist, or the ‘other’, with its associations with the words like art brut, art povera, self-taught, visionary, obsession, naïve, mad, and ‘special’. This is not Kay Aplin, and her house is not of that sort of house. Her’s is a contemporary artistic endeavour. To exemplify this assertion: When asked about a previous art project, her answer was: ‘The idea to extend our collaboration through a residency programme for artists working across the disciplines of ceramics and sound evolved as a natural step in the evolution of my home and gallery space, The Ceramic House.’ Embedded in this answer is the declaration that she is a fully self-aware artist and paid-up member of the art world. She is also a member of the world of current technologies: ‘Every day, walking the landscape, I collected specimens I found growing underfoot. I had to train my eye to look out for tiny plants containing interesting forms and patterns that could be translated into clay’. And here it comes: ‘I used a digital microscope to capture the initial images, allowing me to view plants, or sections of plants, no bigger than a finger nail and to magnify them to larger-than-life scale; to enter inside the structure of the plant and to see that the human eye cannot see.’ She goes on to say: ‘Back in the studio I created I created prototypes in clay, from which I made plaster moulds. I then made multiples by slip casting porcelain, which was fired up to 1280 degrees. I developed a range of glazes especially for this project that reflect the colour palette of the plants I collected.’ This is not the obsessive collecting and naïve gatherings of an eccentric woman, that of a botanist, or even a gardener, but the accumulation of ideas and information of an artist interested in Form, as in colour, shape, texture, pattern, composition, etc. The work is project led, vocabulary led, research led, and identity led. It is interdisciplinary.
Tiling houses in the conventional sense is still not considered ‘woman’s work’, although many women do, in fact, do it. Inseparable from the way that Kay does it is the monumentality of the project (the effort), the laying out of the tiles and its repetitive, incantatory, and rhythmic effect, the intellectual background to each design of tile, and the organisation of these tiles, which are also, in vast quantities, conveyed to various sites for fixed or temporary display. There is also the clear resistance to whimsy despite the botanical motifs and references at work.
Another important consideration is this: the house is also inseparable from the life of the artist, her finely considered dress sense (she is not an inhabitant of bohemia or hipsterville), and her energetic social and intellectual engagement, which is international.
Kay Aplin casually mentions ‘this is woodfired’, holding a tile up to the light, like its merely another colour from her paint box. This attests to a certain attitude and openness to technique, the counter to which is a fetishization of the means and methods so much the wont of many potters and ceramicists. For example, some makers (usually male, but not always) see ‘authenticity’ in ceramics as associated with wood, open flames, the effort involved, and its characterisation as ‘ancient’, usually ‘ancient Japanese’. This effort conventionally involves building monster kilns, sourcing and preparing the wood, labour-intensive firing, and significant slices of time, often days (and then days waiting for the kiln to cool down). It often requires a network of ‘kiln doctors’ advising and helping each other. Every new wood kiln, full of future personality, starts off with ‘having potential’ which can only be realised by experience and closely observing and recording the firing and the results. And firing the kiln many times. Chance and risk are inseparable from this method, and potters making and firing this way are sometimes deemed to be working on the ‘frontline. To Kay Aplin, by contrast, it is a technique amongst other techniques and that the idea and subject matter are foremost. These woodfired elements to her installations are not highlighted or fetishized, but simply take their place among the other tiles. Woodfiring, the way Aplin employs it in her home and in her exhibition work, represents a disruption, therefore.
Quietly situated at the back of the property, in complete contrast to the house itself, is a necessary clean white space, knowingly referred to as the cube, in which the work that resulted from Peripheries was exhibited.
The exhibition of ceramics usually invites the visitor to view the objects, and most frequently these objects are positioned on plinths or shelves (consistent with the default subject position of stopping and bending forward slightly). Touch is sometimes encouraged, but only sometimes. Smell can matter only with raw clay, which is seen less seldomly these days. Hearing involves pinging or drumming on the ceramic object itself, or blowing into (whistles and ocarinas), if that way inclined or invited. What ‘Peripheries’ did was to stimulate a situation that included engaging the body, an invitation to touch, to sit down, to read, to watch a video recording, and to listen to sound recordings. To get to that point the viewer was required to walk up a set of steps, and enter a white room almost cuboid in shape, through its single door.
Beside that door, however, displayed waist high on a metal table, and against a background of tiles of a watery blue colour, was work of around 40cm by 40cm consisting of delicate loops of dark clay assembled to form a matrix, and kind of imaginative and uneven miniaturised landscape we are grateful we are not required to traverse. The artist was Pille Kaleviste. The exhibition notes went as follows: Kaleviste’s sculptural forms, ‘Landscape’ and ‘Bush’, talk about landscape in a broader sense and how it reflects in human consciousness. The genetic patterns are dependent on the rootedness and specific environment of origin. A familiar trail or slope may be sensed and walked on with eyes closed. Two differently built works consist on the one hand from rather static and reproduced blocks, whilst the other is constructed with patience and carries more air and delicacy. Depending on the light and the environment, and where the viewer is positioned, the nature of these landscapes will vary, and be changeable. Whatever the meaning or interpretation we are given, or how words like ‘genetic pattern’ are used too loosely in the written material, the message that a ceramic object can consist of apparent linear and circular bits of detritus can occupy relatively fresh aesthetic terrain not consistent with the container or ornament. This object provided a suitable introduction to what was inside the gallery. Once inside, the two tabletop pieces were, perhaps, the outstanding pieces in the body of work offered by the artist.
The largest and most eye-catching work was that of Juss Heinsalu made out of multiples of terracotta/earthenware tubules, parachute cord, a long metal rod, and local chalk. The label also stated ‘2022, Brighton’, indicating that it was made for the exhibition and in likely to be site-specific. The viewer immediately understood that this was new way of presenting ceramics.
The hundreds of terracotta tubules are beaded into a large blanket using the parachute cord and then draped over the metal rod which rests on the floor and reaches almost to the ceiling. It recalls an important moment in the history of art, and ceramic in particular, when sculpture moved from the plinth onto the floor. The effect is that of a mysterious figure, larger than the average human, cloaked in an open weave of terracotta, a material with a naturally warm colour that lends itself to being touched. The figure is turning away from the viewer, and appears to be reaching out to a juvenile version of itself positioned high on the wall beside it, almost playfully flying away. Open to many interpretations, it engages the body of the viewer by its size, its material, its fleetingness, and the way it moves away almost asking for help. It is one of the best pieces I have seen in a long time.
The label accompanying the piece said it title was ‘Formlessness’, and went on as follows: The work made during the residency deals with materiality. Heinsalu is foremost interested in ceramics as a source material and its properties, both physical and conceptual form, and less so as a finished object. The repetitive ceramic elements reflect the microstructure, plasticity, and formlessness of clay. It is framed within the broader conversation about speculative mineral-based alternative lifeforms. Clay as it is found is obviously formless and consistent with any definition of ‘formlessness’. Was the artist referring to the clay’s memory of gross physical and geomorphological formlessness (hence the title) to make shapes that, on viewing, might refer to the clay’s microstructure (only visible with technical means)? A complex interplay? But ended up with a work that is human in feeling and full of longing?
A small cubicle-like room inside the gallery housed a sound, video, test-tubes, and objects project that was the result of a collaboration between Linda O’Keeffe and Juss Heinsalu. It consisted of a 25 minute 53 second video, a sound recording, and a shelf with test-tubes containing found material, and miscellaneous other found material.
The space the work was installed in focussed the viewer’s attention. It made that viewer feel forcibly hidden from the world and made to concentrate on what had been placed before him or her. This twinge of anxiety felt was entirely appropriate to the work, and especially so when considering the information that accompanied it: As humans we now live on a precipice, it is ‘100 Seconds to Midnight’, our very existence is threatened. In our research we have begun to test and listen to the landscape, the soil, the rock, and the earth. We wonder how a non-human defined entity might try to communicate (with us), perhaps they have been speaking to us all along, and the slow geological time of communication means we have not yet noticed it. And: We have begun to tune in and measure the impact this sound might have left on and under the landscape, within stone, and under water, perhaps it left a sonic trace, a marker. Shifts in continents, expulsions of larva, the slow compression of rock and life over time – a graphic score for us to read, interpret.
Our only true home is the home where we were children, where we dug into the earth, smelt the soils, tasted the stones and the plants, pressed our faces to the floor and crept under beds, wiped the dust from our eyes, licked the metal of the window frames, listened for the noises houses make, go where our animals, wild animals, and imaginations led us, and pushed our fingers and lips into the muddy edges of winter ponds. ‘Continents Shifting’ reminded me of that time of our lives, wondering about things, a little scared of the world, a time that precedes that moment we look up and apprehend the expanding world of science and begin to understand things. The work infers that if only we looked and listened that there would be a message for us.
The modification and distortion of sound through architecture and natural earth formations and places has long been of interest to people. The most famous of these might be the Acqua Vergine in Rome, which delivers pure drinking water to Rome, and which is considered to be the sonic heart of the city.
Turning away from the film and sound artwork, accustomed as we now are to a particular quality of listening, we see the work of Suzanne Walsh. Her offering consisted of a sound piece, or audio-work, requiring headphones, poems on paper, the words and lines laid out in a way that is meant to have us question why, sets of photographs, and QR codes for our mobile phones which took the visitor to Vimeo films.
A key feature of the work is the hybrid presentation, a kind of collage method, which is best explained by the accompanying text: This audio-work is a ‘voces magicae’, made from vocalisations and night-time recording at The Ceramic House, including wind reverberations in the chimney, and a fox. The inspiration comes from the nearby Hollingbury Fort, the speculated site of a temple from the mystical Roman cult of Mithras. The vocalisations was created from instructions from what remains of an ecstatic ritual text known as the ‘Mithras Liturgy. For this exhibition the recording has been fragmented to both merge and invade the other audio work in the space. The body of work also consisted of poetic texts, the layout of which was, I suspect, meant to mimic distortions and other formal qualities in the sounds. It used observations from outings to Hollingbury Hillfort and text taken from ‘A Chemical Account of Brighton Chalybeate’ by Alexander Marcet (1805).
The sound work, ‘Taking the Waters’, for example, consisted of a combination of field recording taken from St Ann’s Well gardens in Brighton, long dried up. It is claimed, also, to be the site of supernatural disturbances and the start of a ley-line. The artist proposed that it was a playful restorative gesture, returning the water imaginatively to the site by means of recordings.
Once back home, I took myself to the two films that the QR codes provided: ‘Chalybeate Express’ and ‘A Small Pleasant Sucking Hole. Both pieces came out of visits to springs in the area, and overlaying the recorded. ‘Chalybeate Express’ showed a bare hole in a vertical wall-like rock structure from which crystal clear water trickled. The water appears fresh and new, but we know it is perhaps billions of years old, the ‘voice’ perhaps that of a counter-tenor. In ‘A Small Pleasant Sucking Hole’, the opening of the spring is covered in obviously moisture loving small-leafed vegetation, perhaps making the recording sound as it does, a deeper, older sound, perhaps as old as the human ear.
I came away from Peripheries with a sense of quiet, and of satisfaction that clay in all its artistic and craft manifestations, and its various collaborations, is a worthwhile and important endeavour; that when an artist says this is mine and it is art, that it is indeed so; that attention and concentration can be demanded from the ready viewer; that this particular kind of engagement with clay and its friends, in all its hybridity on display in Peripheries, can be rewarding.