Playing with Fire
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University of Wollongong Theses Collection University of Wollongong Theses Collection University of Wollongong Year Playing with fire Matthew Jones University of Wollongong Jones, Matthew, Playing with fire, MCA-Res thesis, Faculty of Creative Arts, University of Wollongong, 2006. http://ro.uow.edu.au/theses/57 This paper is posted at Research Online. http://ro.uow.edu.au/theses/57 Playing With Fire Matthew Jones BCA Playing With Fire The following thesis presents research pertaining to Worlds Apart An exhibition of recent sculpture and process drawings by Matthew Jones BCA At Project Contemporary Artspace, Wollongong 2005 and is submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the award of the degree Master of Creative Arts by Research from the Faculty of Creative Arts UNIVERSITY OF WOLLONGONG 2006 Frontispiece: My daughter observing a pit-firing. 2005. 3 Certification I, Matthew Jones, declare that this thesis, submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the award of Master of Creative Arts by Research, Faculty of Creative Arts, University of Wollongong, is wholly my own work unless otherwise referenced or acknowledged. The document has not been submitted for qualifications at any other academic institution. Matthew Jones April 5, 2006 5 Acknowledgements This research relies upon the equable presence of my daughter, Sari: collaborator and raison d’être. Thanks also to my long-suffering supervisors Diana Wood-Conroy, Jacky Redgate and Jelle van den Berg. I am indebted to Olena Cullen and Craig O’Brien, for leading me patiently through administration and technology, respectively. Thanks, finally, for the flexibility and support of John Lascelles and the Project Contemporary Artspace committee in Wollongong. 7 Contents Abstract 9 Introduction and Origins 12 Chapter 1: Environmental Processes 17 Chapter 2: Process as Performance 21 Chapter 3: Fire 27 Chapter 4: The Imagined City 44 Chapter 5: Play and Installation 50 Conclusion 67 * * * Bibliography 68 List of Figures 71 Notes 72 Fig 1. Installation of glazed ceramic vessels, detail. Largest piece 6cm high. 2005. 8 Abstract This research paper examines the essential considerations of my role as a Father, as they reflect and inform my practice as a sculptor. Using initial collaborations with my 5-year-old daughter as a conceptual trajectory, I began to explore domestic rhythms and the communality of multiple objects. Ceramic artist Angela Valamanesh and ‘Outsider’ Howard Finster were found to represent the polarities – austere and chaotic – of repetition. Artistic engagement with the congenital temperament of a child initiated a return to base sculptural principles, bare materials and processes, pre-dating history and evoking the archetype of childhood. This considered regression led to the development of an exploratory ceramic practise upon the beaches, bush and farmland of South Coast New South Wales, culminating in the ephemeral performance object of a ceramic pit-fire. Formally, I have adopted the universal anthropomorphism of the vessel, consciously grouped and presented as the individual members of small ‘communities’. This method of production resolved itself in the suggestive vacancy of the ‘dwelling’, and the discovery of a largely undocumented international tendency within contemporary art. Artists, including Charles Simmonds, Bodys Isek Kingelez, Katarzyna Jozefowicz and Graham Seaton, create uninhabited environments from tiny assembled modules, achieving the accumulation of a multitude. Similarly, my own work culminates in a series of miniature landscapes, experienced both as amorphous playthings and votive objects. My research demonstrates that, through various natural correlations, the roles of ‘artist’ and ‘parent’ are adequately conflated. 9 For it is possible to trace back even the most elaborate of ceramic extravaganzas to a point where its feet stand, as it were, on the ground of daily experience. - Phillip Rawson 10 Introduction and Origins The title of my exhibition, Worlds Apart, refers literally to its formal presentation of separate, clustered environments. Colloquially, it describes the vague chasm between child and adulthood. This latter consideration represents the origin of my work as a Research Masters candidate. My processes - and consequent formal resolutions - intend to conflate the imperatives of ‘artist’ and ‘father’, and have led to the development of a holistic sculptural practice. Accommodating a young child in the studio emphasises the base activity of visual art: the opportunity for playful invention at every pace[1]. In the studio, my 5-year-old daughter became an enthusiastic collaborator and 'play' itself became an exciting method of production. Our tactile creations, though rarely enduring the prescriptions of art criticism, served simply to illustrate the delight in which they were conceived: wild mobiles, liberal scrawlings, roughly concocted dolls[2] and domiciliary painted constructions. Figs 2,3,4. Collaborative drawing and various untitled constructions. Dimensions variable. Wood, cardboard, acrylic. 2005. Requisite to becoming a father was adapting to a realm of domesticity. I began to appreciate the subject, concept and 12 materials of the home, and its local context. For this reason, I responded initially to the work of Australian artist Angela Valamanesh[3] (b. 1949), whose house, to cite an interviewer, 'exudes the flavour of her work - the love of texture and form, of place and space' (Reid, 1). Valamanesh worked in ceramics until the early 1990's, using, in her own kitchen, the functional vessels she made. From that time she began to develop her sculptural practice, and has worked since then, simultaneously, as a sculptor and ceramic artist (Reid,1). Although Valamanesh’s vessels are viewed as gallery objects they remain referentially domestic. As Rawson observes: This intimate connection with a potent aspect of daily life and experience is what gives ceramics its particular aesthetic interest. (Rawson, 3) Her recent installations of functional, 'domestic' ceramics explore repetition, and, consequently, the slight variations that separate individual pieces from the multiple (fig A). Valamanesh creates pure forms; rhythmically irregular, yet precisely and delicately submissive to the particular vocabulary of a grouping. Fig A. Angela Valamanesh. Shelf Life, Green Yellow Green. 7 ceramic vessels on MDF shelf, ed.4, 12cm max height. Shelf 11x70x11cm. 1997. 13 Though the work of Valamanesh was dissimilar in resolution, these notions of rhythm and repetition seemed entirely relevant to my earlier colourful, experimental collaborations with my daughter[4]. Indeed, the child's capacity for repetition, for rhythmic sounds and movements, is well documented[5], and requires no further reference than the domestic anecdote: the rhythmic rocking that calms a child, that urges a baby to sleep through an extra-uterine performance of her mothers breath and heartbeat; the cyclic chants, nursery-rhymes and recited vocal rhythms of child-play. For this reason, I also began to appreciate obsessive rhythms within the disparate art-historical aggregation of 'outsider art'[6] - the rhythmic productions and compulsive repetitions of ‘eccentrics’ and self-styled visionaries. Repetition, in the West, has come to characterise art at the periphery, such as the amorphous environment 'Paradise Garden' (fig B), 1970's, by American Salvationist Howard Finster[7] (1916-2001). The Garden’s three acres of irregular, architectonic vision uses found objects and urban rubbish to form a unique presentation of Paradise. In much the same way, repetition also characterises the ostensibly 'low-art' production of domestic crafts. Fig B. Howard Finster. Paradise Garden, detail. Dimensions variable. 1970’s. 14 That rhythm also exists in Nature is an exhausted observation, repeated to the point of banality, but it is here also relevant to acknowledge the revolution of seasons, of day and night, of hormonal cycles, of the tide, of lives. Art historian Ernst Gombrich argues that the human heartbeat is the basic rhythmic device of artistic repetitions[8]. To allow a child's compulsive and congenital participation in these patterns is, I believe, a primary responsibility of parenthood. My own repetitive production of small objects underscores this obligation, and facilitates an experience of Nature's pulse through the processes described in this essay. Thus, my exhibition is primarily a presentation of ceramic multiples, evoking the unanimity, congregation and natural delineation of individuals, families and communities. ‘One of the prime reasons why ceramics is such an interesting art’, writes Rawson, ‘is that it fills the gap that now yawns between art and life’ (Rawson, 6). 15 Figs 5-12: Various small ceramic groups. Glazed/pit-fired. Dimensions variable. 2005 16 Chapter 1: Environmental Processes ‘Pottery is at once the simplest and most difficult of all arts. It is the simplest because it is the most elemental; it is the most difficult because it is the most abstract. Historically, it is amongst the first of the arts.’ (Herbert Read, Cited by Clark, 10) Herbert Read’s words could, I believe, also be applied to the difficult art of parenthood. Thus, I began to dig small clay samples[9] (fig 13) from the bushland and beaches of my local environment: the Shoalhaven River, Kangaroo Valley and Jervis Bay. Each represents a fragment of my immediate habitat on the South Coast of New South Wales, Australia[10]. Fig 13. Various natural surfaces, containing