A radical vision

摘要

I studied art at the Slade School of Fine Art, which had no ceramics facilities in my time there. I was looking for a sculptural process that had limits, but could become quite fast once the set-up was established. I became interested in ceramics through visiting museums and seeing historic collections - particularly of Etruscan and ancient Egyptian ceramics - and architectural forms, such as models of soul houses. I saw how ceramics could achieve certain colours and effects that nothing else could. I also saw that, historically, clay has been a simulative material often made to imitate 'higher' mediums. Art students around me were making sculptures out of concrete, plaster, and jesmonite and I felt they were reversing that tendency and inadvertently imitating ceramics. In order to start learning how to work with actual clay I had to go back to my old secondary school, which has two electric kilns, and shadow the technician there.