Sometimes I have different expectations of ceramic objects. A little peevish perhaps, as I’m deeply aware (as most of us are) that ceramic is a massive, variegated and ancient art, a prehistoric miracle. It has given us countless masterpieces in vessel and sculptural form through millennia. Because of this, the genre has gathered a mystique to it, an ambiance of timelessness that impacts even on contemporary artists. At the same time, it has run in the opposite direction, by provided billions of us with the everyday accoutrements for eating, drinking, and attending our toiletry needs. In embodying these apparently contradictory components – from unique masterpieces to daily ablutions – it provides us with a model for the plural nature of civilised life. It bridges the unique and the ubiquitous, in a way matched only by people themselves.
But sometimes I want some thing that stretches and tests me beyond this ubiquitous grandeur. I want a ceramic art that stretches and changes the ingrained cultural pattern: I want objects that openly contradict pottery convention, while showing a knowledge of them. The extraordinary interventions of Linda Sormin provide me with such a radical departure. Over the last few decades she has generated a concrete poetry that has pushed into new terrain, and gone well beyond what we would expect of the heritage. Yet what she does remains deeply aware of it.
She selfconsciously asks questions of ceramic. In a recent interview she told us that “I like my work to be caught up in something that is beyond our control. A lot of my work is upturned. I’m asking the clay to be in uncomfortable situations: when I’m asking the clay to be upturned, not in its most elegant moment, [I’m see king] a lack of composure, a sense of being disturbed or pulled out of context.”
Central to this process is a vision of the medium which is capable of empathy, of talking to us as though it were itself conscious. Her objects have the ability to simulate discourse, of talking to us and forming a relationship with us. When we confront a work by her, it is as though we have met someone whom we don’t know, from somewhere else, whom we then strike up a discussion with: “I identify with that a lot as a person who moves across cultures, who lives in countries that are not my home, having that sense of not belonging, being out of place, I want the ceramics to have that embodied sense of not fitting…”
As with so many of the greatest Modernist artists across the media, she is a product of émigré culture. Her process allows her to use her own experience, and to project it into her work. She combines broken fragments of things, discarded and disowned detritus, pieces of writing, often scribbled out, to create linear, open sculptural works that resemble diagrams of neural networks. This is probably a most appropriate analogy: her process of searching, collecting, and assembling is geared to the capturing of the ephemeral: concrete synapses fire out in colour, describing incidents and moments that have come and gone, leaving behind only fragments of evidence. Like the best of Abstract Expressionism, she has injected meaning into abstraction, by making an art premised on the capturing of memories. She describes how it works: “Here in the studio, I write on scrap paper. I slice through paragraphs with scissors… they scatter then realign themselves… I piece my thoughts together with glue… I worked for most of August and September rolling, pinching, cutting and pasting bits of clay into porous ceramic forms…I began to find and press small figurines and kitsch objects into larger clay forms… I extruded and assembled hollow tubes into open, curvilinear forms. I attached spare parts with leftover studio glazes. Gestural objects became sites inhabited by poodleshaped salt and pepper shakers, a Royal Copenhagen Christmas plate, miniature ceramic skulls, shards of wood fired pottery… From the art school dumpster, I gathered discarded objects and materials: Handcrafting and handwriting, found objects and found stories – they intersect and overlap.”
Not much in the way of ceramic convention there, but it explains the intense empathy the work generates. Through her concrete poetry, she is making some of the most important work on the global scene. And she satisfies the wider expectation I have of the ceramic medium. There is still the ambience of ancient knowledge in this work, but also the joy of experiencing the present and future.
– Paul Greenhalgh
Director of the Zaha Hadid Foundation, and author of Ceramic, Art and Civilisation
