Ceramics – visual arts news

Clay Rebellion

vanews — Mon, 08 Jan 2018 19:00:12 +0000

Michael Flaherty, 112, from the Rangifer Sapiens series, 2017. White earthenware with terra sigillata, cobalt sulfate, decals and clear glaze.

Mike Flaherty and I both studied at NSCAD at the same time, but I didn’t know him very well—he was a ceramics student who spent most of his time in the Morris Tea Building across the way on Hollis Street, and my area of focus was more on doing drugs and “subverting power structures.” My first real introduction to Michael Flaherty’s work came when I was Gallery Director of the now defunct RCA Visual artist-run centre in St. John’s Newfoundland. I had only been on the job a couple weeks, and Mike’s work was the first show programmed under my directorship. He was to ride his bike alone from Saskatoon, where he’d just completed his MFA, to St. John’s, where the culmination of his trip would result in a free bike repair shop in the gallery space. There was also a workshop in which Mike would teach basic bicycle maintenance. I was confused—where were the pots? I sat down to have a word with him about his practice.

Michael Flaherty, Shards (Sagona Island), 2013. Courtesy of the artist

CRAIG FRANCIS POWER: You’re a ceramist, but your practice also borrows from certain histories of conceptual and performance art. Your bike trip and your Grey Islands works were durational and performative. And they sort of draw on the notion of the artist as a loner and survivalist.

MICHAEL FLAHERTY: My interpretation of art history is that craft is conceptual art. Craft was a whole new field invented by certain artists as a reaction to the industrial revolution. These artists claimed the industries that were earliest and most profoundly transformed by mechanization (pottery, textiles), began making those things by hand as a form of activism, and used the word “craft” as an umbrella term for them because in that era “craft” had strong political and intellectual overtones.

Yes, my practice is diverse within certain constraints. I’d say that I’ve made some very arbitrary boundaries for myself, and that I try to be as exploratory within those boundaries as I can. I enjoy working within these arbitrary limitations—I think that it provides a framework that augments my creativity, and importantly sets up a system that can then be adhered to, altered, or transgressed.

I’m having trouble articulating here, and you’re not the first person to bring this up, so I will have to think more about it and try to write something more coherent.

POWER: How does that tie in with your pottery, or does it?

FLAHERTY: I think this connection is pretty clear: I’ve chosen to do something very challenging in the middle of nowhere, with no art/ craft community around me, in a province with a totally failing economy and government [Flaherty lives in Catalina, Newfoundland]. It’s another adventure, another challenge, just of a very different nature. I’m also creating a job for myself, and since I’m creating it and can make it anything I want, I’ve made it so I can work with my hands, work outdoors all seasons of the year, earn money by cutting wood, having fires, digging dirt, staying up all night, collecting seashells and seaweed, etc.—it’s kind of a roundabout way that I’ve ended up being a potter, but I had to be a performance/ installation/earth artist before I could get here.

POWER: It seems like you’ve continued to experiment with DIY technology—the solar powered kiln for example—which also seems somewhat performative. Care to comment on the impetus behind this?

FLAHERTY: Not that pottery isn’t challenging or interesting, but I account for this just by my intellectual curiosity. I have a lot of interests and want to pursue them all. I should also say that it’s more than just intellectual—it’s social. I want to be around people who are also making these kinds of investigations and doing these types of projects.

Michael Flaherty, “1914-1922, 1916-1922 and 1919-1922.” White earthenware with terra sigillata, cobalt sulfate, clear glaze and decals

POWER: I’m also interested to hear you say a few words about the ceramic antlers and their relation to ceramic history and conceptual practice.

FLAHERTY: I guess what connects the antlers to history are the formal elements—colour palettes, material choices, etc.—that are more a result of the artifacts that I’m emulating than an artistic or aesthetic choice. But in contemporary ceramic art practice there is a tremendous amount of reference to, for example, the blue and white historical wares that I also reference. I think that sort of pastiche connects those sculptures really strongly to contemporary ceramic art and historical industrial ceramics.

POWER: There also seems to be an ongoing interest with the environment, both as a source of inspiration and in the face of climate change.

FLAHERTY: Yeah, about the politics. I’ve been writing letters to my representatives these past couple years. Now that I live here I actually feel invested enough to do that. The solar kiln project definitely has political commentary attached to it, and I’ve just gotten hold of some clay from Muskrat Falls [a site that the Innu Nation of Labrador signed over to provincial energy corporation Nalcor Energy to build a hydroelectric dam] that I’m going to fire in the solar kiln. That’s obviously a very politically ripe opportunity I have there.

POWER: Can you tell me a bit more the Muskrat Falls work?

FLAHERTY: Newfoundland’s energy problems and political failures are probably not that unique. I think some of the perspectives in my solar kiln piece are about my experience and reaction to Muskrat, but they are universal and transferable to many people’s experience in other parts of the world. I try to not be too regionalized in my work (as you can tell from my attempt to exclude stereotypical Newfoundland imagery in my pottery).

The idea was that it was my reaction to a political situation. And specifically, about my future use of Muskrat clay in the solar kiln, there are lots of ways that could go. First there’s the issue of the north spur of the dam, which is built on clay and is an engineering nightmare which could collapse. Then there is the fact that it is literally earth from Muskrat Falls that I am literally transforming, as the land surrounding Muskrat falls itself is being irreversibly transformed. I like to think that my transformation may be a positive alternate reality to the dam-making and tree-cutting.

Portrait of Michael Flaherty. Courtesy of the artist

From the Archives: Shary Boyle’s voice in the dark

vanews — Tue, 03 Feb 2015 05:44:24 +0000

Editor’s note: Shary Boyle’s work is currently on view at Calgary’s Glenbow (January 31 – April 26, 2015), as part of the group exhibition Oh, Canada: Contemporary Art from North North America. This article originally appeared in the Fall 2013 issue of Visual Arts News.

There are no cars in Venice. It makes for a strange silence, one that affords an ongoing clatter of voices, birds and the bells that ring every hour. In the midst of previews at the Venice Biennale, the city seems an uncanny counterpart to an all-encompassing fever dream. At the Giardini one tangos around impeccably dressed “art heads,” business cards in hand. Line ups for the pavilions wrap around the gardens, punctuated by clouds of cigarette smoke. And there are parties—crazy parties—every night, every afternoon, everywhere. Meander through the city, and one will inevitably discover an installation or performance that will deeply alter how one encounters the next part of the walk. But enter through the doors of Shary Boyle’s Music for Silence at the Canadian Pavilion and the cacophony disappears; it is a jolt of quiet.

“When creating Music for Silence I was inspired by the idea of the Universal, the power and insignificance of the individual, and how that relates to the idea of ‘voice,” recalls Boyle. “The strange audio-sensory experience of Venice … contributed to my thinking around sound, music, silence.”

Outside, a dark, cast-bronze figure of a child sits on top of the tipi-style building, weaving a maypole—simultaneously inviting and menacing. Inside, Boyle has transformed the space into a darkened cave, its walls covered in gems reminiscent of constellations, its floor soft. Two small porcelain sculptures—spotlit and unprotected—

rotate on vintage record players. Each carries a large orb, one in a net upon its back and the other on its stomach, as the figure contorts into a bridge pose. One encounters the projection of an old woman overhead, whose fingers sign without subtitles—a language for the initiated. At first it may seem like a warning, but she is a guide,signing the intention of the exhibit: for those who are silenced; for those never born; for the ugly; for those who can’t run fast; for that which we see in our dreams; and for the deepest parts of the sea, where we go when we orgasm. It is a dedication to half-hidden intuitions, to the knowledge layered upon words.

Deeper in, a large sculpture of a crone/maiden reclines in a cave. Suckling a baby, her wizened face regards the viewer, one leg twisting like the interior of a shell. The light changes every few seconds: front lit and pure white, back lit in blue, and then a noise of images that covers the cave walls in a bright organic collage.

Boyle’s strength of drawing upon site specificity serves her well in Venice. Tucked away to the side of the grandiose British Pavilion, the Canadian Pavilion’s small footprint and curved walls are often considered problematic, a layout further complicated by a tree in the middle of its floor. Boyle was inspired by the building’s design, employing its self-consciously natural architecture to create a highly feminine and phenomenal encounter. Known for her gently grotesque porcelain sculptures that portray mythological narratives, she also delves into immersive installations, using drawn or collaged projections to alter the experience of a space. Music for Silence is a highly considered continuation of her aesthetic.

Her exhibition is also an elegant contribution to the overall conversation of the Biennale itself, whose central thematic emphasizes eccentricities, outsider perspectives and the various forms of the imaginary. Titled The Encyclopedic Palace, Biennale curator Massimiliano Gioni draws from the Italian-American folk artist Maurino Auriti’s proposal in the 1950s to create a structure capable of holding the entire world’s knowledge. As Gioni describes in a press statement for the Venice Biennale: “Auriti’s plan was never carried out, of course, but the dream of universal, all-embracing knowledge crops up throughout history, as one that eccentrics like Auriti share with many other artists, writers, scientists, and prophets who have tried—often in vain—to fashion an image of the world that will capture its infinite variety and richness.” With Music for Silence, Shary Boyle deftly navigates a middle ground between the transcendent and the visceral.

For Boyle, the correlation “was a wonderful surprise, as my exhibition had been fully planned before Gioni released his statement. Music for Silence is a natural step forward within the trajectory of my own thematic and material interest; it was heartening to have such a young and canny international curator share so many of my personal concerns.”

“My work rarely employs the same language used by my peers in contemporary art. This can cause a blank or superficial reading by those not willing or able to interpret outside the current discourse,” adds Boyle. “The astonishing research and selection of artworks by Gioni in the Encyclopedic Palace reflected sensibilities directly parallel to my own artistic interests: the healing, spiritual, narrative, humane, figurative, hand-made, the emotional visionaries.”

Much like Venice itself, Boyle’s work is a suspended, somewhat precarious reality where old worlds meld with contemporary: “The city is ancient, and in its architecture and history combines mythologies of both East and West … Venice was a crossroads where treasures of the world were exchanged or plundered. In this way it is beyond uni-cultural, it reminds one of a broader past and shared humanity,” says Boyle. “The magnificent ideals of Art and God are always paid for by someone’s misfortune, some other’s painful reality. The underwater-subconscious dreamlike nature of the place also supports this essential idea. It is invented, impossible, mysterious, decaying.”

On my last day, I visited the old galleries and halls scattered across the historic city. Threads of Boyle’s art were everywhere: in Tiepolo’s baby drinking from a mother’s corpse, in Bosch’s macabre altar pieces, in the gilded Mother Mary. I found myself wandering down several twisting stairways into a series of courtyards near the Piazzo San Marco. Ancient sculptures were stored in every side alley, moss-covered and exposed. Although I could hear crowds somewhere, over there, I was alone, left—like Boyle—to contemplate the impossible beauty of this surreal city that crumbles silently into the water.