IC:Innovative Craft Blog

Of porcelain and pots

Posted Monday 10 November 2008, 10:11am

Three ceramic bowls by Gwynn Hanssen Piggot.

Clare Twomey's porcelain dust wall installation in London. Photo courtesy Paul Winch-Furness.

Clare Twomey (www.claretwomey.com) installed her wall piece at Dovecot on Thursday and Friday. The shift of scale from Jerwood Space to Edinburgh has been fascinating – there is an elongated band of porcelain dust rather than a complete wall and subtler details of texture are already apparent. It will be interesting to see what Edinburgh hands make of it. Both Clare and I feel excited by the result. Also read her printed Conversations. Apparently we speak on average 9,000 words in an hour. This statistic haunts me – quite a sizeable essay being lost into the ether. Except she captured it. We plan to explore the spoken word in Edinburgh in December too. The Scottish potter Will Levi Marshall has been invited to talk about the work of the Edward Marshall Trust on 9 December: other ideas in the planning. 
Meawhile, I contrasted, in my mind, Clare’s exploration of porcelain in space with a very different exploration by the older Australian artist Gwynn Hanssen Piggott. Having finally unpacked three beautiful bowls acquired from the recent Scottish Gallery show, I positioned them carefully under an attic window. I was rewarded this morning by brilliant winter sunlight lifting and animating each shade of white, creating a mesmerising symphony of tone. I found the following words written by Gwynn on the web (www.ceramicstoday.com):
‘Beauty, and our response to it, remains a mystery.But, it seems to me that, in the alchemy of making, the pot becomes subtly humanised. It is as though a kind of knowing – a history of understanding, and a sort of longing is translated, through care and consideration, and an intimate connecting with the stuff under our fingers…into a form with an independent life.  With its own power to move.’
Not a bad thought to carry forward as we install the rest of Jerwood Contemporary Makers.

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Raising the Bar in Wales – and another exhibition looms in Edinburgh

Posted Monday 3 November 2008, 11:59am

Seating by Jim Partridge in the Courtyard at Ruthin

David Watkins: Askant the Brook

Last weekend my colleague Elizabeth Goring and I dodged the Cumbrian rainstorms to drive down to North Wales for the installation and opening of Raising the Bar at the Gallery at Ruthin.  This, rather eccentrically, was my second visit to Wales in a week, as I had travelled to see the last day of the David Watkins jewellery show (discussed in the current issue of Crafts magazine) the weekend before at the same venue. 
The Watkins show was an impressive survey of 40 years of studio practice and convincingly confirmed for me the role his work has played in creating a benchmark for innovative studio jewellery from the 1970s onwards.The show marked the publication of a major monograph by Beatriz Chadour Sampson, which creates something of a benchmark for publications in the field (Arnoldsche 2008).  During the afternoon of setting up Raising the Bar, S4C, the Welsh language arm of Channel 4, spent more than four hours filming the show and interviewing local Welsh speakers about their reaction to it (favourable, I am glad to say!).  It will be broadcast this Wednesday and we’re hoping to access a subtitled version in due course. 
The new spaces at Ruthin are very beautiful.  For both visits the sun was shining in Wales and the Ruthin courtyard entrance, richly furnished with several variations of Jim Partridge and Liz Walmsleys’ seating designs casting shadows against the warm terracotta walls of the building, is very exciting and welcoming.  Partridge/Walmsley also designed the café furniture and the Reception desk. It’s a real delight to see craft as an embedded and substantial part of a new building, not an afterthought.  IC will be working with Jim and Liz on a new project for Edinburgh from next autumn – an exhibition and prototyping idea, which we hope will bear fruit in Spring 2010. 
Back in Edinburgh the dust is subsiding, the Victorian steps have had a final coat of red paint and the Reception Area is floored and fitted. Next week’s delicately-balanced schedule begins with Clare Twomey painting one wall gold and spraying it with clay dust and is followed by an influx of objects, display stands, vinyl panels and assorted installation teams from both Jerwood, Henry Moore Foundation and IC/Dovecot.  By 14th November the new exhibitions will be open and we shall be beginning another journey with Innovative Craft.  We look forward to welcoming you back. 

Please take a look at Past Events, ‘Raising the Bar’, where we have added some images of the Ruthin event to the Gallery.

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Moving into Autumn

Posted Thursday 16 October 2008, 02:47pm

Works by Mark Rothko (left) and Nicholas Rena

Amanda Game writes:

Autumn has reached Edinburgh. Cold, but brilliantly sunny throwing the city architecture into sharp and extraordinary definition. All the summer exhibitions are dispatched following an exceptional final day on 27 September which saw 2,600 people flow through the doors at Dovecot in six hours.

Weavers, invigilators, Directors and friends were all pressed into service to act as guides and helpers as our visitors patiently queued through all areas of the building. By the following Wednesday Dovecot had returned to its familiar status as a building site. Wisely, I left the all too dusty corridors for London, managing to visit both the Rothko and Bacon exhibitions. The late Rothko at Tate Modern was a revelation. The final room of Black and Grey paintings was emotionally powerful, magnetic and fascinating. Painting rarely gets better than this.

A quick Italian trip also meant a chance to see the Piero della Francesca frescoes at Arezzo. There is something in the way this Renaissance master uses space that reminded me of the American modern master. A spatial clarity. You get it in great objects too. The Nick Rena exhibition currently at the Scottish Gallery demonstrates the same powerful quality: partly predicated on the balance between line, edge and void. That was also very striking in some of the Henry Moore sculptures we looked at in Indian summer sunshine this week after viewing the Textile show at Perry Green. It is exciting that we are showing Rena’s work in Jerwood Contemporary Makers later this month alongside the Henry Moore Textiles.

Back at Dovecot we have taken delivery of a grand piano; a compressed air gun tufter and a great quantity of fine white dust. More muck than clarity at the moment but hopefully November will change all that.

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Of human structures and other collaborations

Posted Tuesday 23 September 2008, 09:25am

Fran Priest, artist, talks to Kate Davies, curator, at the Craft Curators' day, held at Dovecot

Jerwood Contemporary Makers will open at Dovecot on 14 November

Amanda Game writes:

I’m currently spending the hours between going to bed and sleeping (approximately 15 minutes per night) in reading the Charles Leadbeater book We-Think. In a month dominated by news of the failure, or temporary shutdown, of grand scale human structures (Large Hadron Collider; international capitalism), it is reassuring to read positive stories of human structures thriving courtesy of a more collaborative, communitarian approach.

Structures, Leadbeater argues convincingly, at least by page 79, that are encouraged by the opportunities of virtual technologies. Mass innovation not mass production, as the book’s strapline has it. It’s interesting to consider the new Dovecot building in this light. In the past month we have welcomed groups of visitors from schools; German high finance; Scottish historical societies; our neighbours from Edinburgh Council and Edinburgh University; representatives of the Scottish business community, courtesy of the Art and Business reception last week and a group of specialist decorative arts curators from Shetland to East Kilbride.

The latter group joined us today at a Scottish Arts Council-sponsored networking opportunity – it was very stimulating to hear of all the creative projects being quietly steered into existence to celebrate craft and design across the country. On Saturday we end the current crop of exhibitions (last to chance to see them!) with an active participation in Doors Open Day, the Cockburn Association-sponsored celebration of architecture here in Edinburgh. We are particularly delighted to be testing the acoustics of the Weaving Floor with a 53-strong Australian girls choir.

It seems to me that mass collaboration is an active part of Dovecot – a fact that will be reflected yet again in our next pair of exhibitions, Henry Moore Textiles and Jerwood Contemporary Makers, which will open on 14 November. I think Charles Leadbeater might approve.

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A glass act – IC’s inaugural lecture

Posted Thursday 11 September 2008, 02:52pm

The South Gallery is ready for the first lecture at Dovecot.

We were delighted to host our inaugural lecture at Dovecot last week:

Ann Wolff and Christopher Burns

Transparencies – Glass in Architecture

4 September at the Dovecot Studios

The South Gallery space was transformed through the addition of some simple corrugated paper blinds and some chairs hired from Andrew Wilson into a very practical, small lecture room. WarPro hired us the projection equipment and patiently set it up as we transferred the lectures from the artists’ sophisticated but incompatible laptops to my clearly very idiosyncratic old Sony which made all the architectural images look cropped. Some 30 attendees including glass makers, artists, architects and general visitors joined us for a glass of pink Prosecco and a very stimulating talk (see Alison McConachie’s comment below). The general buzz of conversation afterwards demonstrated the positive response to the talks, which combined confident presentation, clarity of thought and inspiring images. Thank you to all concerned.

Alison McConachie writes:

‘These combined presentations gave a rare insight into an architect’s vision for a building as an ever-changing multi-layered 3D canvas and how this has created a dynamic living and working environment for the artist Ann Wolff.

I have a great deal of respect for the many ways in which Ann Wolff uses glass in a most expressive way. I responded very much to what she said about the inherent beauty of glass and the need to go beyond what can be a barrier to make it work for you as a medium. I enjoyed her description of the ambiguity of glass and its ability to deceive the eye. She celebrated the versatility of glass, as compared with the canvas, as one can always go back to the previous layers that combine to create the whole picture.

The cast works that she showed were lovely examples of her ability to capture the gestural movement of her instinctive drawings in a very natural way, drawing with line and form but also with the control of colour density through the varying thicknesses of the glass to great effect.

Alison McConachie
eca glass

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