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"What it is to work with clay" - Clare Twomey

There is a language to clay that lies at the very core of its identity; when you hold a piece of clay you understand its potential to be formed and molded. This is a basic and rewarding process that can be both successful and futile, one that is defined by our ambitions for the material set against the actual task of making. In Japanese philosophy the accidental properties of clay are a celebrated part of the ceramic process, a gift from the clay or the kiln, the unintentional being, something discovered rather than a considered mistake. This poetry exists in our clay culture in the continual sense of discovery of the material.
 
Clay was a necessity, a material that enabled the rituals of drinking, carrying, storing and sharing in communities; it was essential to many cultures. For me in the twenty-first century it is a material to make things with, things that have ideas embedded in the clay body that are attached to an historic or manufactured identity.
 
My role with clay is one of potential for the manipulation of the known, from the manufactured, to the designed, to the adoption of others’ skills. For me working with clay is less akin to the serendipitous journey of poetry, but more about an articulated use of the constructs that surround clay materials.
 
The culture of the twenty-first century has moved us from need to thinking about the diversity of materials and their role. I am concerned with contemporary culture, with thinking and doing, the role of objects, our relationships with those objects, and the obsessive cultures of collecting. My starting point would be the following comment or realisation:
“It’s all going to go, it’s a question of when we recognise this and how we understand this.”
 
Museums are sometimes built as monuments to the self; similarly, books are written to be handed down as monuments to thought and as a form of ownership. I hope to leave no monuments but instead build bridges in order to acknowledge that we are part of this experience, the experience of the twenty-first century and all it has driven us to be and want. The work I make builds relationships with time, material and culture as part of an ephemeral dialogue. It is this dialogue that allows the viewer to have possession of the work as an experience rather than as a valued object. Time-based work has a particular role to play in museums and audience experience that enables this shift from a culture of objects and collecting to one of collective thought and action. 
 
This relationship is intrinsic to the use of clay as a ubiquitous, transformative material that is embedded in cultural relationships in the home and in the hand. The material culture of clay is warm and known: it is a protective and historic material that gives every person who lives in a brick house, drinks from a clay cup, and walks on tile floors, the right to intimately know clay.

If we look for a moment at our relationship with clay as a raw material it starts from a young age through haptic engagement, through touch and play; how easily we come to understand a material by shaping it with our hands. From the first crude figure made in soft clay through to the finely made china of Faenza, we know what it means to hold this material in some form. This relationship is vital in the work that I make. This understanding, desire, and capacity to empathise with clay resonates in the knowledge that is brought to my work through public interaction.

The infinite possibilities of clay as a material stay with us – it changes form, it changes role, it is an historical construct but in dialogue with culture it is deeply embedded in human existence.
Through my work I have explored the material’s relationship to object production and value, its relationship to skill and craft, and its relationship with history and taking care of things.
The medium of clay has allowed me to explore our relationships with value, worth, time, and trust within a specific material context.
 
Often the things I make disappear from my grasp; sometimes the things I make disappear from the viewer’s grasp. Sometimes they become a singular object for one individual who had to get involved, who had to make a choice, who had to transgress a given pattern of behaviour, leading to a choice that will stay with them and that they will acknowledge every time they see, touch, hold this object.  This primary involvement with the material results in a visceral memory, an essential experience of having contributed to the evolution of the work, its transition from one state to another.
 
What do I get out of making things that disappear? I get to make more, I get to try harder, to dig deeper into what it means to see, to acknowledge, to think about actions. I have no desire to keep things. I want to make more, to find out more about people, place, and the potential we have to respond and what this essentially means.
 
Some things I make are left as a matter of course; some things are kept as a personal monument. Each has a role that is quite different in this specific moment and in the future.
It is the future that I am concerned with. This can be understood by the acknowledgement that the past already exists, but that the future remains a curiosity. Clay, with its historical role and material heritage, is a fertile tool for this discussion. Clay is not a reductive obsession; it presents rich possibilities within my work.
 
The large works that I produce are often experiential and transient; no product exists for the gallery or museum. This transience is a dialogue that is common to current cultural phenomena rather than a condition that only exists in my practice. Craft is a vital part of my practice as a maker of objects and in understanding material. An historical understanding of ceramic practice and the use of materials have a huge impact on the evolution of my work.
 
The relative value of material as content was a fundamental aspect of my installation titled Consciousness/Conscience produced for the Crafts Council exhibition Approaching Content in 2003. All the artists in the exhibition considered an aspect of the conceptual that surrounds material and forms part of its meaning.
 
Consciousness/Conscience developed into a conceptual debate about human behaviour and how this could be traced. The majority of my installations are reliant on human interaction – physical or philosophical – to validate their intention. In Consciousness/Conscience the audience was invited to experience change and became aware of their physical impact on the gallery space. Their action was destructive; entering the space involved treading on and crushing the thousands of bone china floor tiles produced by Royal Crown Derby (RCD). This destruction was not an isolated sensual experience but part of a journey, with the floor positioned as a division between the art works in the gallery space. Curiosity on behalf of the visitor became the primary motivation for smashing the tiles; the vulnerability of the lightly fired tiles further accentuated this action. On entering the space visitors became more aware of their action, my hope being to invoke a momentary reflection.
 
The fragility of the tiles was significant to the conception of the work and proved the starting point for the development of further projects in partnership with RCD. Understanding both the content of bone china and the manufacturing process forged not only an awareness of their production, but also a relationship with the conceptual content of the work. This installation has influenced subsequent work that examines the material qualities of clay alongside narrative or spatial concerns. The strongest example of this occurred in Trophy, an installation produced in association with Wedgwood and shown in the V&A’s sculpture court in September 2006. It consisted of thousands of small bird forms placed on and around the sculptures.
 
Each piece of Trophy was made of Wedgwood Blue Jasper clay, a distinctive and instantly recognisable material with an implicit value that makes it unique and understandable to the UK. I wanted to produce something using this iconic material that would tempt visitors to act on their instinct and to steal. Being made aware of its value was pointless – one should know its value and intuit its worth. This conceptual aspect of Trophy encouraged the thousands of visitors to the V&A not to hesitate in stealing the birds during their temporary installation in the cast courts. Trophy starts as a gentle, light, almost decorative piece then, as action and contemplation arise in the viewers, the work deepens to the level of individual choice and reflection. My ambition for Trophy was to make desirable objects that could be owned, treasured and taken, a material reminder of an experience, a choice and a risk, the risk being to leave with an object from the V&A’s collection.
 
For the duration of the installation, the thousands of visitors that experienced Trophy re-examined what it meant to own an object and to question its value. What started simply as a pretty group of birds dusting the V&A’s Cast Courts for five hours led to questions such as: What does it mean to own an object of value? Can this one object describe the complete experience? Is the object simply a reminder of the absolute experience? I invited the visitors to send me images and updates on the birds that would then form part of the installation: I have since received hundreds of emails and pictures that indicate the degree of thought given to this institutionalised, mass theft at the V&A.
 
Two emails in particular highlight this sustained interaction:
 
I chose this particular bird because I liked the cobalt colour – which reminds me of the decoration on the traditional Japanese ceramics I collect – the jaunty angle of the tail, and its particularly sharp beak. He’s now living on my bookshelf with other miscellaneous objects, including Japanese and Indian gods, a Statue of Liberty cow and pink Eiffel tower.
 
I took the bird cause I really like the pointed beak and the tail. This breed of bird looked like it was a more proud bird, defending its patch. So it will continue to do that in my bedroom!
Its new home for a while will be in Willesden!
 
I hope my work raises more questions than answers; the viewer is in control of the level at which they engage. There is a sense of moving through time that clay can give us, not just in relation to the archaeological dig but also in the loss of skills; this is not a phenomenon particular to clay but one that spans our changing landscape of objects and object production.
 
In the work Blossom ten thousand handmade flowers tell the transient story of skill and what it is to make a beautiful thing. These flowers made by hand by women in Stoke-on-Trent tell of a language passed down from mother to daughter, over workbenches, kitchen tables, and factory floors. These skills are dying, as the flowers are no longer desired by the market. Each flower is made by hand, each petal is distinct to its maker’s hands, and each character and natural flight of fancy is now part of the work of these women, passed down to them by the women before. The ten thousand flowers were not fired so that, in the long days of winter, they melted back into the ground at the beautiful Eden project horticultural site. All that was made was lost, all that was made was seen, and all we have now is the memories and stories. This is a precious moment, a moment to be savoured and kept, but aside from the romance jobs are lost and skills become spent.
Amy Dickson said of this work: “Grief at the waste of skill and a desire to commemorate dying skills is also present in Twomey’s Blossom 2007, which comprised thousands of fragile, handmade, unfired clay flowers which were ‘planted’ at the Eden Project, Cornwall. Exposed and vulnerable, the flowers deteriorated and disintegrated over several weeks. Hinks China, the company who made these delicate flowers has now closed; the skills and women who worked there have disappeared like the clay flowers themselves which, over time, vanished back into the ground.”
 
I would like to look at the work Monument in detail. Its relationship to the past, the present, and the future is married in the recognition of this vast pile that represents the endeavours of skill, the well crafted and well made, as a large pile of industrial waste.
 
Monument was a pitcher pile from the heartland of British pottery production in Stoke-on-Trent. A pitcher pile is a place where the “ware”, the ceramic objects that are not fit for sale, go onto the pile and are deemed as waste; the pitcher pile I saw was at Johnson Tiles. Johnson Tiles collect the pitcher from all over Stoke-on-Trent and, instead of using it as landfill, ground it up to form 20% of every new tile they make. The ware that is in this pile comes from our premier heritage producers: Wedgwood; Portmeirion; Leeds Pottery; and the list goes on. The ware we see in the pile could well form part of our museums’ collections in the future: objects that are designed and produced that reflect twenty-first century material culture. The objects in the pitcher pile have failed in this sense but encourage a discussion on loss, hope and identity. The vast pile of china poses questions on the human condition in relation to loss.
 
As we scan this vast pile we understand what we see: the delicate, the beautiful, the lament for these objects, and the wonder at their current state.  As Monument was placed object by object in the galleries at The Zuiderzee Museum and MIMA, this industrial waste adopted the narratives of the new buildings. The pile was elevated from being considerable waste to becoming a dialogue on contemporary concerns for the masses and the individual.
 
Glenn Adamson wrote of the work – “It almost goes without saying that in this story of industrial re-creation, Twomey stumbled on to the ultimate metaphor for rebirth in the face of destruction. Usually pottery and china are thought of as emblems of fixity. They persist for millennia underground, telling us about people who have left no other trace. It is appropriate that Twomey’s installation literally upends our mental image of an archaeological dig, because she is insisting that ceramics are not always a fixed trace of the past; they can also be cyclical. Each of these shattered objects has a specific past, more or less un-retrievable.  All the objects undergo a collective present, which is laid out before our eyes. And each will have a specific future, which is currently undecided.”
 
It is this notion of the undecided that leaves the door open for a discussion of new works that need to be made and understood. In the work I have made for the Magic of Clay we see time and waste being celebrated in the future, telling a story of now to be judged by future generations. What kind of culture are we, what have we left behind to tell our stories and what monuments shall we present to the future to shape our time and our actions?