Ceramics by Paul Scott and pieces from the collections at UWA
and Ceredigion Museum
Curated by Paul Scott, Jo Dahn and Neil Holland
* * * *
Clay is often seen as an expressive medium. Studio potters speak
of their pleasure in handling the raw material, in exploring
techniques, and in creating form. Paul Scott takes a different
kind of pleasure
in his work. His engagement is with the surface rather than the
substance of the clay, and even then he shows little interest
in experimenting with its formal qualities. Instead he emulates
the
look of mass produced consumer wares. In spite of this (or perhaps
because of it) his work is unmistakable.
Scott has always been involved in politics. At college in the
1970s he was elected president of the Students Union. He led
a student
strike and occupation of the college, and became active in the
anti-apartheid movement. That he remains politically engaged
is apparent when one looks at his work in this exhibition.
I like to make work that provokes some reaction or thought, work
that is more than superficial. The issues I deal with are the
ones I come across in my everyday life, sometimes close to home,
like
foot and mouth, or Sellafield, sometimes further away like Israeli
bombing of refugee camps, or US treatment of prisoners. But even
these far away issues are close to home because we buy Israeli
fruit and veg in our supermarkets, we are or can be complicit
in these things. I want people to think...
He makes much use of ready-mades, particularly tableware blanks
from well-known factories like Spode and Royal Worcester. These
industrial products are eminently suitable as vehicles for the
themes that concern him, and through them his work can be situated
in an historical continuum. Ever since transfer printing on clay
was invented, ceramics have displayed motifs that reflect current
affairs. Political and historical events, for example, have long
been commemorated on the surfaces of objects such as plates and
jugs. This ceramic ‘mode’ is still going strong.
Think of the multitude of wares that celebrate the wedding between
the
Prince of Wales and Lady Diana Spencer.
They may grace mantelpieces, walls and cabinets up and down the
country, but commemorative ceramics are not generally valued
for their aesthetic qualities. Equally mundane and equally ubiquitous
are the objects that occupy the precarious territory of tourist
wares and ‘collectables’: the teapot embellished with
a photograph of a local beauty spot above the legend A Present
from…, the ‘editions’ of decorative plates sold
via the back pages of the Sunday supplements. Age may enhance their
aesthetic status (a souvenir from another century has a certain
folksy cachet) or they may find favour amongst aficionados of kitsch,
but by and large they sit alongside the willow pattern in ordinary
homes, and like the willow pattern they have become so familiar
as hardly to merit a second glance. Their familiarity makes these
objects ripe for appropriation. In Paul Scott’s hands domestic
ceramics mutate into subversive comments on our life and times.
His manipulation of the established vocabularies of printed motifs
and patterns, and his use of the traditional blue and white, gives
his work a particular resonance that leans on our recognition of
its roots. The process is akin to the ‘making special’ that
Ellen Dissanayake has identified as crucial for the social production
of art.
To the passing glance, everything about A Millennium Willow for
Sellafield (or Plutonium is forever, well 24 Millennia anyway)
seems quite normal. It is not until one looks more carefully
at the plate that one spots the nuclear reprocessing station
tucked
into the cosy pseudo-oriental landscape. It takes another minute
or so to notice the skull and crossbones and the symbols for
radioactivity integrated into the border. Here is something that
everybody knows,
or thinks they know, but it has been irrevocably transformed.
Public and domestic worlds collide in the overlap of imagery.
As Scott
remarks, ‘like Sellafield the Willow is seen by many but
examined by few’. Where the original design showed eloping
lovers crossing a little bridge with the woman’s father in
pursuit, he has three figures holding the flags of Germany, Switzerland
and Japan: Sellafield’s customers. The Chinese junk in
the original becomes a boat laden with reprocessed fuel. The
billing
doves of the willow pattern are reworked as pigeons.
In 1998 all the pigeons within ten miles of Sellafield were culled.
They had been roosting in the power station, and tests showed
that they carried radioactivity into the surrounding area. Local
RSPCA
inspectors now wear protective clothes. What Scott calls ‘the
Seascale pigeon’ (Seascale is the village closest to the
reprocessing plant) haunts several of the pieces on display.
On Marseillaises Seascale Pigeon platter one flies over the countryside,
dissolving the boundary between urban and rural and unsettling
fond notions of bucolic simplicity. Caught inside a border of
scrolls
and roses, it highlights the relationship between private lives
and public issues.
Paul Scott lives in rural North Cumbria, the region at the centre
of the devastating Foot and Mouth outbreak in 2001. It was an
episode that he could not ignore. A series of works draw on the
prints
of Thomas Bewick (1753-1828) often regarded as the father of
modern English book illustration. Bewick’s A General History of
Quadrupeds is illustrated with small wood-blocked vignettes that
show animals in their pastoral habitat. Scott has simply removed
the creatures: cut them out to leave a poignant void. A more hard-hitting
piece, his sinister Foot and Mouth platter, shows the bodies of
cattle unceremoniously dumped onto a smoking funeral pyre. He recognises
its ‘brutality’, but points out that
…
this image or others like it were commonplace on our TV’s
for nights on end, and for us in the countryside a common sight
and smell for weeks on end.
Although overprinted in the cobalt blue of the traditional willow
pattern, the Foot and Mouth platter does not reference tableware
as directly as A Millennium Willow for Sellafield or the Marseillaises
Seascale Pigeon platter. There is none of the typical decoration;
a bone china blank from the Spode factory acts purely as a canvas
for the shocking image. Other plates and platters have been overprinted
in a similar way: straight across, without regard for the conventional
format. Scott is not sentimental about the countryside and several
of these pieces, such as Wigton Factory and Chapel Cross, reveal
his appreciation of industrial installations in the landscape.
Despite his concern for their effects, there is something in
his depiction of their vast geometric structures that recalls
late
eighteenth century attitudes. At that time the mark of industry
signified progress. Places like Coalbrookdale in the West Midlands
(where the Ironbridge was seen as the eighth wonder of the world)
were popular tourist destinations. ‘It is wonderful to see
the vivid green of the plantations so near the smoke of the works’ wrote
a woman visitor in 1794 ‘… there is something in this
contrast very pleasing.’ The awe she felt when gazing at
the dramatic view corresponded with aesthetic notions of ‘the
sublime’.
Where sympathy with terror is combin’d,
To move, to melt, and elevate the mind.
Industrial scenes were celebrated on ceramics. Late eighteenth
century tourists bought and displayed souvenirs, much as we do
today.
Although he has interacted with the collection at the Beacon
Museum and Art Gallery, and for an exhibition there in 2001 showed
his
work in the same gallery as selected historical pieces, Remember
me when this you see is Paul Scott’s first opportunity to
place his ceramics in intimate juxtaposition with the family of
objects that they reference. His enjoyment in choosing from the
collections at the University of Wales, Aberystwyth and Ceredigion
Museum was evident. He would recognise a pattern, or a printed
motif (it was often a tree) or discover a theme that could be linked
to his own concerns. In some cases there is a very clear connection
between his work and ceramics from the collections. Scott’s
ironic series of A Present from teapots, for instance, are displayed
close to ‘real’ souvenir teapots showing local beauty
spots. In the beginning it was difficult to imagine what could
be placed beside his bleak Foot and Mouth platter, but a china
pail with the words Pure Milk, discovered in Ceredigion Museum,
and some broken cow creamers from the cupboards at the University,
gave rise to a darkly humorous tableau.
Until relatively recently mass-produced tablewares and commemorative
ceramics were not thought worth preserving in museums, and many
of Scott’s selections show evidence of wear. One extraordinary
plate is held together by a mind-boggling 27 staples, and several
pieces are chipped and cracked in testament to past use. Such
details only emphasise their relevance to his project. These
were once
the cherished objects of everyday rites, the much-handled paraphernalia
of domestic mysteries.
I realise that for political commentating and agitating there
may be more suitable media; but industrial ceramics are still
used
by many people as an art form. It has a relevance to their lives,
it acts to decorate the walls (or dressers) of their homes, it
graces their dining tables. It has been described [as] ‘low-brow’ art.
So as such it is a visual language which many people are familiar
with.
It is two-way traffic. Mass produced domestic ceramics give Scott
a vocabulary, and in return he gives them his - and therefore
our - attention. Collected, catalogued, conserved, curated, set
behind
glass; however humble their origins, objects are transformed
in an exhibition. The venue itself calls for a heightened quality
of attention. An exhibition elevates a domestic object. Things
that were previously known mainly through use, or taken for granted
as part of the everyday fixtures and fittings, are now scrutinised.
They are separated from the host of similar objects and re-presented
as something worthy of prolonged consideration. Our contemplation
shifts to their visual aspect. In some sense this more concentrated
viewing process mimics the way printed ceramics would have been
regarded in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century,
when
they were exciting new products whose illustrations would have
merited careful examination. Scott plays on the notion of the
museum object. With prefixes like ‘Scott’s Cumbrian Blues’ and ‘The
Scott collection,’ the titles of his ceramics make reference
to both private and institutional collecting practices. On the
reverse of each piece are found his maker’s mark, numerical
information about the printed ‘edition’ to which
it belongs, and sometimes his signature. Such details evoke the
connoisseur:
turning an object over to check its authenticity.
At the beginning of this essay I suggested that Paul Scott takes
a ‘different’ kind of pleasure in his work. He feels
a responsibility to respond to current events, and is critical
of ‘self referential, inward looking’ tendencies in
studio pottery. Unlike most studio potters he does not experiment
with the plastic qualities of clay. But he is acutely aware of
fired clay’s subtler characteristics. Both the appearance
and the ‘feel’ of his work are affected by the quality
of the industrial blanks he uses; porcelain gives a crisper printed
line and a harder edge than earthenware, for instance. And while
he may not actually make forms, he strives for a look that is
indistinguishable from the mass-produced and to that end is constantly
refining his
techniques. At the same time the range of surface imagery that
he draws on is constantly expanding. He has become very knowledgeable
about printed ceramics and their history.
I have begun a serious and focussed examination of a quite particular
series of objects: industrially produced plates with printed
(often engraved) images, and prints from the same period. I am
intrigued
by the fact that engravers and printers may well have worked
on (printing) plates for both paper and ceramic, I am interested
in
finding out how the Romantic Vignette, Thomas Bewick, and blue
and white plates are related….
Imagery that began as the target of ironic appropriation has
ended up by captivating Paul Scott. Whatever the issue he addresses.
Jo Dahn 29/7/0
Paul Scott: biographical and career details
Paul Scott attended St. Martin’s College, Lancaster from 1972-1977. He
started out as a painter but moved over to ceramics, partly because he did not
see eye to eye with his painting tutor, partly because he became aware of the
breadth of possibilities that ceramics offers. He emerged with a B.Ed. degree
in Art and Design and a Post-Graduate Certificate of Education and went straight
into school teaching. In 1985 he decided to strike out on his own. He resigned
his post and has since been successful as a freelance artist, writer and curator.
His exhibitions, publications and reviews are too numerous to list here; it is
worth noting however, that from 1987 to 1998 he was commissioning editor for
ceramics at Artists Newsletter magazine, and that he is the author of ‘Ceramics
and Print’ (A&C Black 2001) and ‘Painted Clay’(A&C
Black 2000). Although he is widely recognised for his expertise on both subjects,
ultimately it is print that most fascinates him. ‘Hot off the Press’,
the pioneering exhibition that he curated in 1996/7, brought together a wide
variety of ‘printerly’ approaches to clay, and established him
as an authority in the field. Since then he has continued to energetically
promote
the marriage of ceramics and print. Teaching is still a significant aspect
of his professional activities, and he has led workshops and short courses
at venues
across Europe and in America. From January 2000 to January 2002 he was Senior
Research Fellow in the Department of Fine Art, University of Newcastle Upon
Tyne, where his duties included technical instruction to undergraduates as
well as
consultation and advice to postgraduate students.
