Origin - in Turbulent Times

The Autumn Equinox has brought with it an atmospheric change. An economic year of bumbling along, sort of hoping things might improve has suddenly blown up into a maelstrom of recrimination, anxiety, market chaos and talk of recession round two. Origin, now in the beating heart of trendy art-world East London, oozed confidence by contrast. It hummed with activity which, I hope, was an indicator of people deciding to spend money on well made, long lasting objects they would love.

Origin is vast, overwhelming in some respects. You can't look at everything unless you have all day and a substantial reserve of energy. I go there for the ceramics and, to some extent I notice the metalwork and furniture too. Jewellery, textiles and sundry other weird-looking accessories interest me not one jot and, these days, with limited time, I simply edit out of my vision all that does not immediately engage. This year, I looked only at the ceramics and, for the first time, bought things. It's my new project -  kick-starting the economy.

Sophie Woodrow's porcelain dream-world beasts made an enticing reception committee. With hollow eyes and strangely clad in unlikely costumes, they stood on their hind legs, those that had them, and stared and I stared back. An owl with antlers, covered in miniature toad-stools, a bull with a lowered head and large bow, hedgehog-like creatures and rabbity things - all called out mournfully for attention. It was astonishingly affecting and surprising too  -  a relief not to encounter more of the vicious bunnies intended to subvert or shock but, instead, something quietly and genuinely moving.

Aneta Regel-Deleu had a gorgeous collection of new work - weird bone-like structures, half live, human, and growing but also surreal and anything but human, in their skins of ferocious-coloured glaze - matt powdery pink, bright orange gloss and vicious yellow.

Then came the tableware, which is where I got out my debit card. First stop, Sun Kim, her sleek, oatmeal coloured stoneware has evolved into a fine collection of supremely elegant tableware. I sulked when I found no mugs with handles. 'A disastrous firing,' she explains, and promises me mugs at her forthcoming open studio. I make a mental note to reserve enough money for one of her teapots too. On to Linda Bloomfield's stall where a lovely new lemon yellow glaze attracts me and I buy a mug, tall and straight. She's also developed a new mushroom coloured glaze. 'Men didn't buy my work until I made the 'grey,' she explains.' She's talking to a woman from London Potters Association who's taking copious notes and questioning every potter closely, particularly about sales. Origin, according to Linda, delivers the goods. Hooray! So I'm not the only one determined to kick our sluggish economy up the ass then.

Finally, it's Chis Keenan. Lately he's been making delicious Temmoku glazed work with sky blue insides and sure enough - he has mugs. Mugs! Proper mugs with handles - he's one for the Japanese aesthetic which is all very fine if you're Japanese but I'm English, very English, and I like a good stout mug for tea, brown tea - and I've always had my doubts about blue with brown. However, to my surprise, I find myself selecting a mug with a handle and buying it. Someone had asked him to put a handle on a tea-bowl apparently - and damn sound advice it was too. I don't hold with this tea-bowl nonsense. The colour is gorgeous. Ok, so the Temmoku is a wee bit marmitey and the handle's a bit fussy - Keenan's a tad over-crafted for my tastes but this is proper mug-shaped mug and I wasn't going to pass up on the opportunity - I do love that black/ blue mix. I needn't have worried about the blue / brown tea look. It works perfectly. The tea just reaches up near the rim where the black of the Temmoku is bleeding into the blue and it's just exactly right. Looks like a turbulent Autumn day in fact. Slurrrp. That's better - and silky smooth too, enough to calm the most jittery nerves, even those of the markets.

Origin, The London Craft Fair, 2008, part 2

Quote of the week, or possibly of the moth:

“My star customer at Origin was someone who owns Edmund de Waal's wall of pots
but feeds her children off my tableware.”

This from Linda Bloomfield, she of the delicate pink interiors.

So Origin 2 was, well, altogether more upbeat than week 1. If we consider the Crafts Council’s stated aims, one of which is to create a viable economic infrastructure for the craft sector, then this was an unqualified success, as far as I could see. It would be a truly ground breaking achievement if countable numbers of makers could generate a sustainable living wage from making and selling their work, assuming that’s what they want, without needing to be from a class or family background which is able to provide a trust fund, or help with the mortgage, or similar, to keep things afloat. The acid test of this is if a critical mass of women from non-moneyed backgrounds can achieve that even if they are single, or have no obvious access to money. Then you know you’ve got an infrastructure not just a sprinkling of exceptions, or a group of people who’ve netted higher income partners. If they can achieve that, I’ll be cheering them to the rafters, however ‘naff’ ore over perfect the craft is.

Some Pictures of Pots in Origin

Decided to show the pictures separately, not sure why, but the lengthy review of Origin is the post below. So, from the top, we have, Helen Beard's Meadow. Helen is one of very few who illustrate pots, in fact she may be the only one. The point is she deploys pictorial space a sort of pot perspective. The Meadow needs to be seen as a vast group to be the meadow she envisages. Origin isn't the right space for it, but here's hoping she finds somewhere.
Next is Katrin Moye. Some of her pots have rich brown insides, like those seaside souvenirs.
Next is the weird knitted cups. Imagine drinking out them. These are made by Annette Bugansky. She had some quite pervy zip up ones as well.
Alinah Azadeh's 'crafted space' is next. Such a relief to the eyes and to the psyche to find something BIG, light and airy.
And finally... Sun Kim's mugs. Gorgeous. She doesn't seem to have a website. If I find one, I'll add it.
This is a tiny sample of over 100 exhibitors. I did take more photographs but they're a bit fuzzy. Battery running low I think. Off to the sunshine to recharge my own batteries.

Origin, The London Craft Fair, 2008

Ladies and Gentlemen,
The C Word has important news to announce:
Sun Kim makes proper mugs with HANDLES! Yes, it’s true. Maker of very fine porcelain tableware, she did her stint in atelier de Waal, and emerged unscathed. None of that dimpled beaker business, so popular among makers of whitish ware. You can lift one of her mugs to your lips, and slurp your tea without fear of burning your hands, dropping the mug or waiting so long to touch the damn thing that the tea’s now tepid and undrinkable with a milk slick on the top. Yeucccchhhhhhhh.

To business then…
There is no doubt that under the auspices of Rosy Greenlees, the Crafts Council has become vastly more professional. Whereas the old Politburo spawned the Chelsea Craft Fair, which was a King’s Rd version of the annual church bazaar, so the New and Improved version has produced Origin which is altogether more Knightsbridge. It kicks off in a big white glistening tent in the Somerset House courtyard, next to Waterloo Bridge, in London, with fat carpets underfoot and every ‘stall’ a polished white or grey sort of cabin with plinths or whatever is required. You can plug in your laptop and play on line backgammon all day if you want.


As to the craft, well I didn’t see Chelsea after about 1985, and yesterday was the first time I’ve seen Origin, but ‘a source’ told me that they’d brought many new, younger makers this year. Gone, apparently, are most of the ‘old guard’. I’ve no idea who the OG were, but they’ve gone anyway, so perhaps it doesn’t matter. For better or worse, Origin now represents the newyoungupandcoming glitzy professional designer-makers. Origin is a shiny, glittering shopping mall and it meant business. It is unequivocally the commercial, commoditised end of craft, Greenlees’s ‘sector’ at work.

Strategy
So, like pushing an elephant up a long flight of stairs, you push craft up market and, all being well, the makers can, at last, earn a decent living. So everything is polished and ‘well made’ to the point of self-parody. It has to be, this is the ‘gold standard’. I have no idea if the strategy can work. It depends on the buyers understanding that they must pay much higher prices than they would for something which may well look quite similar, from Habitat or Cargo, but is in fact mass produced. Anecdotally at least, it can work. Chris Keenan designed some work for Habitat, and someone came to his stall at Origin and said, ‘Oh, I’ve got the one from Habitat, now I want one of the real thing.’ So, if this version of craft can project an idea of ‘authenticity,’ the ‘Original’ in fact, then the strategy could be a winner.

Class again..
The risk, and it could be a big risk, is that pushing it up market will just make it look, well, upwardly mobile, 'pretentious,' as someone, (Grayson Perry) once said. You see, you cant ever get away from talking about class when it comes to craft. If it goes posh, and people can actually earn a living without starving in the winter, it's called 'pretentious', in other words it's 'jumped up', 'got idea's above it's station.' The makers are s'posed to be peasants for godsake. Not earning a good wage. God's bread, whatever next, muttered the colonel, snorting into his port. My hunch, especially in the light of the global banking crisis, is that the top end will work, but I’m not sure about the knitted socks. By top end, I mean hand made, very high quality silver tableware, for example, well-crafted, contemporary design. I’d buy it. Portable wealth d'you see. Ceramics sits right in the middle. I’m not even going to try and guess.

Too much craft for the content
What i'd really like to see, is a move away from the insistence on 'well made' or rather, dare I say it, a more sophisticated understanding of what constitutes 'well made.' At the moment it's still stuck, as it ever was, in the 'too much craft of the content' rut. Most of the objects I encountered were just too ordinary to tolerate being blisteringly well made. Their material perfection just couldn't be justified by the banality of the object. So, what I'm really saying, is I want to see more substance and less craft. But this is not what Origin is about. I am in the wrong place.

Crafting Space
So much for the stalls, there are other things at Origin too. You could say it’s trying to be all things to all people. Hidden in dark nooks and crannies in the liminal spaces between the stalls, there are pieces of art. You can tell, because they’re on their own in dark spaces with carefully, self consciously written, curatorial flannel accompanying them. For all I know, these might be fabulous, immensely interesting works. If only one could see them. I wanted to like then and be happy they were there, god knows, for these I am certainly the designated audience. But they felt more like craft's dirty secret than convincing art moments. And as all good C Worders know, Craft is in fact Art's dirty secret. There is also an ‘interactive’ space. At first I thought this was a highly imaginative piece of audience research and was well impressed. I was wrong, it was an interactive textile work – which could still work as audience research but I don’t think that was the primary purpose. There was a big wire cage with ribbons woven into it on which were written the answers to questions such as: ‘what did you buy and why does it interest you?’ ‘Who are you giving the object to and what do they mean to you?’ and ‘Describe a gift you’ve received and how its changed your relationship with the giver.’ Find out more here.
The interactive project worked better than the art nooks. It was much more central and open and also inviting because you could sit down. They should have provided tea though. It was based on the old Persian poetry sharing thing, so tea should definitely have been there – or wine perhaps.

The Jury's still out...
For those of us who love craft because we relish its lowly status, its down-homeness, its folksyness, and we use that to explore a host of related ideas and tell all manner of low down tales, then Origin is a Big Yawn. It is mesmerising, busy with people and objects, and, once I’d got round it all, stupefying. But it isn’t meant for me. It’s meant for the people who go to Dorothy Perkins on Saturday, or Harvey Nichs on Sunday. For Craft readers who know London, but haven’t been to Origin, it’s like a turbo-charged CAA (Contemporary Applied Arts,) but more Bond St. than Oxford St, more Harvey Nichs than Dotty P, but both, I assume, are the intended market. The thing that I did feel sad about was that I couldn’t think of a single thing, that I really wanted. I was left with no feeling of desire or covetousness. I reflected on that for about half a day, and then remembered Sun Kim’s mugs with their silky satiny matt glazes, and their proper, properly placed, handles. So, just one thing then.

Cabbages and Quilts: The Wootton Flower and Produce Show, 2008.

Cabbages and Quilts: The Wootton Flower and Produce Show, 2008.

Ra tatataaaaaa, drum rolllllll, ratatat, dum diddle dum diddle dum dum dum. Intermittent strains of brass band music twirl around tents and idling teenagers, village elders and passing visitors, all of whom milled about the glistening green lawns and drifted in and out of immaculate white tents at this year’s village flower show. If ever there was an act of faith, a testament to optimism it was this. A rain drenched, wind swept, dripping cold August had put aside one fine day, Saturday 30th, for Wootton’s annual extravaganza of cabbages and cakes. Apples and preserves, cable knitted cardies, quilts and roses, all expertly assembled, jostled for position on their tables, and were justly, or unjustly, rewarded. An incident over the gladioli was duly calmed, the wasps sought refuge in the prize-winning cake, and everyone delighted in the glorious sunshine which bathed the tents and lawns and gardens all day.

So here it is, an authentic village flower show, which, as far as I can see, is still pretty much as it was 40 years ago, when I won first prize for a painting, aged 6. No one’s gone out of their way to insist in its unchanging state. It just hasn’t changed. Of course the people have. I’ve drifted off to London and the village has been almost entirely repopulated but the flower show still has runners and beets and marrows and carrots and ‘garden on a plate’. My niece made a mangrove swamp one year. She’s still feeling misunderstood because she didn’t win a prize. She’s 21 now. The ‘home craft’ is still astounding. It doesn’t seem even slightly naff to me, not in this context. It’s quite at home here. The exquisite smocking is for someone’s new baby, the tea cosies are for teapots, the quilts for someone’s bed, the knitted cardies will be worn, the wooden toys played with. I know, it all sounds too idyllic, but it is true. I don’t quite know how it is that people have the time, but the work is here to prove it. They’re not trying to make a living from it, which helps, but it’s all made for a purpose.

This should not be mistaken for ‘rural’ craft. Certainly Wootton is a village and is in ‘the country’. It is, however, a suburb in character, but one that is detached. It is one of the wealthiest areas in England now and its economy is entirely urban. No one goes to work in the village. Everyone who lives there works in neighbouring cities. The place is deserted during the day, apart from the school – ah ha, so there are teachers who work in Wootton, and as very small number of people who come to clean houses and maintain gardens. So Wootton flower and produce show is a product of urban – not always wealth, but stable income - combined with a mixture of creative domestic activity, good gardeners, - and these are the ones cared for by the owners, not paid gardeners, - and an industrious spirit – oh and a touch of neighbourly competitiveness. Tottenham flower and prod show would be very similar. There are enough people with a stable income to fund the creative domestic activity, a wealth of domestic skill, and we even have the ‘country’ house, - Bruce Castle – which can compete with any in the land – and we have the 400 year old oak trees. It would just be a more multi-cultural that’s all.

As to craft, village craft vs. gallery craft, well – craft it seems becomes a problem requiring scrutiny, only when it departs from the flower show and from that use/comfort/decoration mix to something that either questions itself and what it’s doing in an industrialised society or when it is used as a medium to explore ideas which are part of its habitus, probably, but not part of it usual or original social role.

This seems like a good place to leave this post which serves, I think, as a good introduction to the next series of posts which will talk about Ceramics in the City, Origin and so forth, as well as a fond farewell to the summer holiday – such as it was.

Waking up, produce update, coming soon, and reflections on the C Word

Yaaaaaaaaawn, streeeeeeeeetch, yoooooowl, stp stp stp. That’s better.
The summer holiday flower show continues. The garden is now so irretrievably out of control that I’ve given up, apart from mowing the grass in the feint hope that that makes it all look deliberate. Looking on the bright side, however, the produce is coming along splendidly. See above. Ate my first home grown plum today. Don’t know if those grapes will ever get fat and sweet, but I’m still holding out for a hot late summer…
The lilies were truly sensational, even if it was an all out battle with the lilly beetles, and the roses are still going strong as is the jasmine. The fox, it seems, has departed for now, and two wood pigeons, who live in the neighbours plum tree, are devouring the entire crop of the elder berry tree behind my shed. They’re so fat they can hardly move now. One of them actually had to sit on its bum and have a rest on my shed roof this afternoon.

That’s my mum with the goats by the way. We went to France and saw OTTERS! Yes real live swimming wild otters. Never seen them before. And a VAST toad sat on the door step to my bedroom every night, and, I fantasised, ate all the mosquitoes. My bedroom door opened on to a courtyard garden. ‘Weren’t you tempted to kiss him?’ asks my flat mate. I can honestly say the thought never entered my head. I liked him just fine as a toad.

So I’ve been reading and planning my next C Word posts, and, here’s a little bit about me and my work now, I’ve been planning my first ‘international’ show. Well, we’ll see if it really is. I’ve been invited to do a one person show at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Esfahan, in Iran. I have decided to believe it really will happen, which means I’ve started making the work for it. I plan a trip to Esfahan in November, when I hope to get the contract. When that happens, I’ll be boring you to death about it. So enough of this for now. I just thought I should account for my absence in some way.

Books? Elif Shafak’s ‘The Bastard of Istanbul’, very warmly recommended, and ‘Thinking Through Craft’, Glen Adamson. This has been rather weirdly reviewed in my opinion. The two I read were critical of the number of what they called ‘art’ references. I’ve finished the first chapter, and, yes, he does meander about referring to craft practices in both art and craft. All I can say for now is that, as far as Ch. 1 goes, it all makes perfectly good sense to me. The main reason why I’d really recommend this book though is, first, that he’s really well read. There are numerous references to writers to such as Adorno, Derrida, among many others, - these have dominated so far – but the great thing is he explains what they’re saying as he goes along, so you don’t feel like a total dork if you haven’t read them. (I haven’t.) The other thing I REALLY like is that he doesn’t have a peg firmly clamped to his nose, which most art historians and especially craft historians, do. You don’t have to agree with everything he says, you can have a robustly juicy argument with the pages of this book if you wish, but at least you know you can cheerfully thump the table over a pint and somehow know it wont matter.

The ‘coming soon’ list which is usually in the right hand column is coming soon, next week sometime. There will be a post about my week’s summer school doing Egyptian dancing, then, with a bit of luck we’ll be into village craft, at the end of August, then the new craft ‘season’ kicks off with Ceramics in the City, 19th-21st September and Origin, 7th-19th October and so forth. Ah yes, I’m also trying to persuade a publisher to accept a proposal for a book about ceramics and feminism. I’ll keep you posted on that, to say nothing of my fantasies about an exhibition.