The Northern Print Gallery WC at Ouseburn
contains a new commissioned artwork - Willow Creek. The WC’s
walls are clad with printed, glazed porcelain tiles of life size
trees, a Willow Pattern plate sits in the tiling on the window
sill - the washbasin contains a banded patterned border and a
Willow Beauty moth.
The studios are housed in the renovated Steenberg building, originally
part of Woods Pottery, which in its time produced a substantial
quantity of blue and white printed tableware – landscape
patterns and chinoiserie. It seemed appropriate thus to use ceramics
and print to create a contemporary artwork reflecting both the
current usage, and the building’s historic role in disseminating
pattern and image. The work also references Thomas Bewick’s
wood engravings. Bewick, who was based in Newcastle, revolutionized
book illustration in the late eighteenth century - his beautifully
observed images of birds and animals together with his vignettes
of rural life are still familiar and popular over two hundred
years later.
The original prints used as a source material for the confection
were fine and small in scale – patterns and details from
tableware (including engravings printed with the Northern Print
etching press – used in Sweden at the Rörstrand Museum
archive) as well as tiny details of Bewick’s vignettes
from book illustrations. Drawing and cloning with digital tools
I have grown the miniature into new life-size trees and foliage,
creating a small wooded garden room, together with insects and
birds, to house the WC.
Creation of the artwork involved the digital manipulation of
image and pattern in Adobe Photoshop to create life size forms,
which were then ‘tiled’ to create thirty-five different
silk screens used to print over sixty A3 ceramic in-glaze decals.
These were applied to ready-made glazed Wallendorf porcelain
tiles before re-firing to 1250ºc in an electric kiln. At this
temperature the print sinks into a melting glaze and turns deep
cobalt blue, and as it cools the image becomes suspended in a
thin layer of glass.
Printed blue and white ceramics have a long, mostly forgotten
history as a disseminator of image and message, and whilst our
perceptions of them have changed and faded over the years they
still retain a familiarity – they form part of the cultural
wallpaper in our minds. As an artist I’m interested in
exploiting and stretching this familiarity.
The commission is the latest in a series of works, which examine
the relationship of iconography, object, scale and location.
