BREAKING THE MOULD

Katharine West is one of a growing number of Irish ceramic artists working to elevate the medium beyond the generally held perception of ‘craft’. Here Katharine talks about the process-led development of her work in light of her recent exhibition at the Linenhall Arts Centre in Castlebar, and also about the current status of ceramics in Ireland.

There's always been a very strong logic going through my work in terms of connections, but there is also a primary set of concerns that remain constant. What I tend to do when I am building up ideas is to take them through a process of appropriation, starting off with the representational drawings that I make in my notebooks.



My central concerns include nature, for one, and the sea has also always been a very important influence. When I went to art school I did a lot of drawing from the figure, which had a huge bearing on my sense of volume and structure. Another strand in my work is linked to historical and cultural memory, based on archetypal forms - implements and suchlike. The figure has only really emerged as a strong element in its own right in the last five years or so, and then in the last two or three years a sort of ‘visceral’ element has come out. With a show I had in 1999 in Dublin I started to look much more overtly at the medical side of things. I visited the Museum of Medical History in Paris, and I was fascinated by what I saw there. What caught my attention was the correlation between some of the medical equipment on display - specifically dishes used for bleeding people, which were beautiful archetypes in terms of the bowl and the dish - and their convergent relationship with the body in terms of form and function.

The 1999 show was a turning point for my work. I was trained in Craft Design at NCAD, where I specialised in Ceramics, and I was taught by people who had come out of the British tradition of vessel-making and decorative arts, dealing with a material that was associated with function. When I continued my studies in Strasbourg I started to see a lot of contemporary art, and that excited me much more than my own tradition. It made me ask a lot more questions and I found it more stimulating to look at. In Ireland at the time you only saw contemporary art every four years in Rosc. Things have changed hugely in the last 20 years, but then Ireland was still isolated artistically. I hadn't come from a background that endorsed sculpture, but the parameters of decorative art were not challenging me or bringing me anywhere new.

Thinking about what I made in terms of sculpture, the boundaries became limitless, and I found that very exciting and liberating.

My current show came out of a three-month residency at the European Ceramics Works Centre in the Netherlands. A lot of shapes that I started to work with in Holland came from the drawings I made on a short residency in Paris last spring. I spent a lot of time in museums just looking at artefacts, extraordinary things with very organic shapes. I'd also been dealing with these dish-type shapes that I mentioned earlier, and what happened was that the two started to come together. The work became concerned with looking inside. Being able to see inside the pieces - the whole idea of internal volume - became an important factor.

The work in the exhibition is basically monochrome. I used to use colour in my work. It was partly because I came out of this tradition of process, where you made pieces and you fired them, then you glazed them, and only then were they considered finished. After a while I became aware of the fact that I was much more excited with the work before the colour and glazing stages. Gradually I began to drop the glaze because I just realised that the porosity of the work was fascinating in itself. I also realised that when I used colour I was breaking up the form. I became completely possessed by form, and colour became extraneous. The work is pared down to form, texture and the incidence of light. That is how it has remained. The work became very much about skin in a sense - if you have a porous surface it is permeable, and that kind of access interested me. That idea of access has now opened up in a different way in the most recent work in that you can actually see into the pieces now through apertures and openings.



As well as ‘stand alone’ sculpture, I have also made a number of installations. I started looking at relationships between objects, I tried making pieces that one could relate to on a human scale, and so my work became quite large. I wanted to take away their preciousness - in terms of sitting them on a pedestal or whatever - so they had to be large enough to hold their own spatially. The most unpretentious thing that I could find to do with them in space was to put them on the ground. As a result the relationships between the pieces and the dynamics of the pieces within a particular space - the energy that they could build up or contain - became very important. The space between the pieces became pregnant, so to speak. The work became a lot about movement in space and I became more aware of how the forms themselves were housed in space. I don’t think I ever made a conscious decision to make an installation. I was pushing away from the notion of ‘object’, but the only way I could do that was actually by making many objects and putting them in space where they were much more interdependent, where they could work as part of a larger whole.

The perception of ceramics as an art form in its own right is unfortunately still in its infancy in Ireland. There is still a divide, which in this country relates to the kind of training you have gone through. Its almost as though one is not allowed to transcend the boundaries. The interesting question is: who sets the boundaries? There is a feeling of being pigeonholed here which doesn’t necessarily exist elsewhere. The status of ceramic art as an end product in itself is still a very primitive debate in Ireland, sadly, and I think that people who have been through a certain art training in Ireland find it very hard to recognise clay as a valid medium in its own right. They endorse a particular hierarchy of materials. Surely it is down to the content of the individual’s work, no matter what the medium. This debate is not necessarily an issue for me and my work, but it is a limiting, constricting reality for many. I have enjoyed the luxury of working abroad where one can easily transcend barriers. Once one transcends barriers they become less relevant. Ultimately where one needs to place one’s own work in terms of context is what matters.

This unwillingness or inability to accept ceramics as a true art form is to some extent an aspect of the art/craft divide. For some people that divide is huge. In the past printmaking suffered from a similar stigma, but now it has been generally accepted as a fine art medium. I hope the same thing will happen for clay. Unfortunately at the moment there are very few opportunities for ceramic artists to exhibit because of that art/craft divide: a lot of galleries don't take on people who work in clay. A lot of time it is to do with people not being aware that clay can be more than functional or decorative pottery. To that end exposure is extremely important. That is one of the reasons we set up Irish Contemporary Ceramics in 1997, with touring shows that hopefully allow as many people as possible to experience our work. The interesting thing about clay is that people respond to it in a very positive way, they can identify with it. It is actually very accessible and the public response has been overwhelmingly positive. Hopefully we are moving in the right direction.

The artist wishes to acknowledge the assistance of the European Ceramic Work Centre, the Netherlands, in the realisation of this body of work.

(Based on an interview with Katharine West in the February 2001 issue of Arts West magazine.)