ALEXANDER HEIAA: DOVES

摘要

It is not often you find pots at Edinburgh's edgy Doggerfisher Gallery -not ever, in fact - so their appearance in an exhibition by the young artist Alexander Heim warrants attention. Heim's show, part of the Edinburgh Art Festival, had made an earlier stop at London's equally left-field Institute of Contemporary Arts. More bizarre still, his pots looked like... well, like pots. Where Grayson Perry's play post-modern games with social and ceramic propriety, Heim's seem to be concerned with old-fashioned things such as textures and glazes; maybe even (gasp) with functionality. With Tate St Ives planning a major exhibition of the work of Dame Lucie Rie next year, can clay be making that fine art comeback we've all been waiting for? Well, sort of. Heim's ceramics are certainly functional, although their function is not the one you might think. They may be incidentally decorative - at Doggerfisher, they were hung prettily on the wall - and you could, at a pinch, toss a salad in one of them. But their purpose, most un-pot-like, is to be tapped. Although I did not do so myself, striking Heim's bowls apparently produces a hollow clang, rather like a gong. Noise is certainly nothing new in ceramics - clay temple bells were made in Shaanxi Province 5,000 years ago - but Heim's bowls do. confuse function and form. Their propensity to be hit also suggests a new take on the words 'hands on'.