Modern Artefacts

摘要

Engaging with Duncan Ayscough's pots is a sensuous and multi-layered aesthetic experience. Formal and material contrasts are clearly evident as voluptuous full bodies extend into long elegant necks and strongly delineated forms contrast against complex surfaces. An intensely defined relationship exists between the dark exterior and the jewel-like apertures that lead into the interior spaces of the vessels. On closer investigation an extended list of intellectual contrasts and contradictions are evident. Duncan has an obsessive need to control the making process, but then consigns his work to the chaos of sawdust firing. He enjoys unpretentious and utilitarian ancient artefacts as a source, but imbues his work with sophisticated aesthetic and cultural discourses. He is a socialist who makes non-utilitarian pots for people with disposable incomes and an eye for resonant, beautiful objects. In a sense some of these contrasts and contradictions are shared by many craftspeople of the late nineteenth, twentieth and twenty-first centuries. You could say it is anachronistic to produce 'hand made' pots in Wales or any other Western industrialised culture today. The successful market-driven economy we enjoy has, built into it, many social and cultural contradictions and distortions. Duncan's pots, as other exemplary highly crafted objects, provoke questions such as what is the meaning, function and value of the 'hand made' today?