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Brief Description of Work:
Hand-built ceramic pots\r\n
Training and Experience:
1966-67 - Leeds College of Art
1967-70 - Central School of Art & Design, London (DIP AD)
1970-73 - Royal College of Art, London (MARCA)\r\n
Selected Exhibitions:
1990 - Retrospective organised by
Aberystwyth Arts Centre, toured British museums and Boymans van
Beuningen Museum Rotterdam, Holland.
1998 - Solo Exhibition at
Barret Marsden Gallery, London\r\n
Other Activities:
Writing on the applied arts since
1978
Part-time tutor at Royal College of Art since 1984
Curation eg 'The Raw and the Cooked' for the Museum of Modern
Art, Oxford in 1993 which toured to Japan and France (co-curated
with Martina Margetts)\r\n
Artists Statement:
I think that my pots appear to be
the work of someone urban, a person used to attempting the
integration of diversity. The pot is an ordinary and easily
recognisable object. As such it is a good vehicle for playing the
images of disparity and connection, as for instance between
sculpture and painting, or form and fiction, which is a title I have
used for an exhibition.\r\n
Further Information: \r\n
After visiting Alison Britton in her north London studio,
unexpectedly situated amidst a population of Hassidic Jews, I read
about Pearl Abraham. She is a young Hassidic Jew whose frank first
novel about teenage yearnings within that strict religious culture
breaks a taboo. In looking at Alison Britton’s majestic new pots, I
think back to the end of the 1970s just after Bernard Leach had
died, and remember how her generation had also seemed to break with
the orthodox view of beauty and utility inherent in Oriental pots,
Leach’s yardstick. Set against this, Britton’s pots, their form,
decoration and ambiguous function appeared not only unorthodox, but
even subversive or perverse. \r\n
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And yet, like the readers of Abraham’s novel,
Britton’s work is embraced by those who see in it something they
admire: a Modernist’s search for presence and essence, expressed
through an abstracted fusion of painting and sculpture, the nub of
her method and purpose. For Britton, it is less a question of
breaking taboos than of consistently developing a ceramic language
which articulates her concerns. These have grown out of her liberal
intellectual background, her awareness of education, psychoanalysis
and art through the careers of family and friends. \r\n
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Perhaps, after all, the orthodox and unorthodox,
like tradition and innovation, are mutually interdependent. Britton
sympathises with the view that originality is based on tradition.
For her the pottery tradition has always been important: ‘It’s an
identity within which I can play about’. She has worked happily
within it, enjoying its generous inclusiveness as a genre. Clay as
stuff, as raw material for a urinal or a Hindu temple, clay as the
primordial material for expressing the prosaic and poetic.
Understood in virtually all cultures through time, it has both
anthropological and metaphorical significance. \r\n
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This connectedness is vital in Britton’s way of
interpreting the world, but in her work she is careful to avoid
literal appropriation. ‘I’ve breathed in a lot’ she says, ‘but it’s
very important that it’s unconscious’. In the early 1970s, she drew
copiously at the British Museum. Her tiles and pots in that decade
took the form of figurative narratives, using the clay as
two-dimensional canvas, with words and line drawings of people,
animals, objects from diverse and imagined cultures. It was only
towards the end of the decade that seeds of abstraction and formal
experimentation germinated, which had been sown by Gordon Baldwin
and Hans Coper, her respective teachers at the Central School and
the Royal College of Art. Britton worked with trails of slip to
create abstract pattern rather than pictures and at he same time
shifted the earthenware slabs into structures of risky formal
complexity. \r\n
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This dramatic change, towards a synthesis of
sculpture and abstract painting in objects, established the idiom
which Britton has continued to develop and refine over the past
fifteen years, complemented by her writings. By 1982, in the
catalogue for the Crafts Council’s The Makers Eye exhibition,
Britton had already written the seminal text explaining the
significance of her work and many of her generation: ‘I would say
that this group concerned with the outer limits of function; where
function, or an idea of a possible function, is crucial, but is just
one ingredient in the final presence of the object, and is not its
only motivation’. In the years since then, her numerous pieces of
writing, about her own work, about others, about themes surrounding
contemporary crafts, have contributed greatly to our understanding
of making and meaning, and it is not surprising to find Britton
averring that of all other creative forms, poetry means the most to
her, ‘its weight and layering’ something she hopes her pots
evoke. \r\n
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Through form and colour in her pots, Britton has
interpreted tradition, using blue and white, still life, dish and
jug forms, thumb pots as intimate ‘handles’. If her work creates a
frisson by confronting the formal arena - our concepts of tradition,
function and art in pottery - then a further frisson is created by
its content. Britton acknowledges that the human body is a central
focus of the pots. ‘They’ve always been to do with bodies. The pots
I’ve seen that mean something to me all re-connect to the body. But
my pots must be a pot mainly’ I’ve curtailed them from being more
referential - to go more towards the body would lose that
tension’. \r\n
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The tension is established through a fine balancing
of inside and outside, of male/female qualities - androgynous
ambiguity. The idea of the body is inherent, subtly integrated in
the pot. There are holistic, oblique references to our physical and
emotional selves: lines, wrinkled skin, awkward limbs, protrusions,
and nuances of feelings and thoughts. In these new pots, subject
matter is not literal; her earlier work she has explained as being
about nature and civilisation, myth, past and present. These now are
about being a certain kind of person, living in a city in the 1990s,
seeking to reconcile all the diverse issues and values and
influences which bombard an individual. ‘You should be able to see
that I am not a meat-eating fascist’. I can. \r\n
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The whole working process underscores this liberal,
lively, provisional, reflective character. The archetypal and
repetitive process of constructing form from clay imbues the pots
with a powerful resonance. The rolling out of slabs of clay,
sprinkling in crumbs of dry clay to add texture, laying in the marks
in slip which eventually bond the form, are almost intuitive
processes. Lines appear like ribs, scars on a body. The glazing is
precarious - ‘You take your life into your hands; you could blow it
every time’. Each pot takes days to finish, over a period of time,
decisions and adjustments mulled over and worked through. In all her
work Britton seeks to ‘keep it lively’, to ‘take risks within a
fairly low-tech context’. With these new pots, Britton aims for
‘striking forms, slightly taller, creating a presence, to make an
impact in a casual way’. \r\n
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Britton does not abandon pots she has started.
Unlike her teacher Hans Coper, who confessed that he worked ‘like a
demented piano-tuner, trying to approximate a phantom pitch’,
Britton works in an atmosphere of acceptance to coax colours, marks
and form into awkward, then finally, triumphant harmony. ‘You have
to believe in your own creativity; to have the courage to start
without an idea. There is an excitement about working uncertainly
and things slowly coming to fruition’, emphasises this distinguished
potter. ‘The prize is resolution after a struggle’. \r\n
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Martina Margetts \r\n
Writer, curator, lecturer in Humanities, Royal
College of Art, London \r\n
May 1996 |
