post from Linda Bloomfield re CLF

Introducing an intriguing post from Linda Bloomfield about the CLF. I know this sounds like the militant wing of Ceramic Review, but it's actually the Country Living Fair. Here's what she confides:
I have just returned from exhibiting at the Country Living Fair in Islington, which is for ladies from the country to come and do a day's shopping. The good thing about it is that you get huge numbers of customers who wouldn't go to the usual ceramics and craft fairs. They buy my pink cake stands, jugs and bowls and some come back every time to add to their collections. They come from as far away as Yorkshire and the Scilly Isles. There is not much competition from other potters, apart from the likes of Emma Bridgewater or similar. Makers there included Jane Cox, Anna Perring of Luna Lighting, Lucy Dunce, who makes beautifully decorated earthenware dishes, and Gemma Wightman. I also saw a few of Katrin Moye's luscious fat jugs on Margo Selby's (woven textiles) stand. If you make things which appeal to women from the town and country, then you can sell a large amount at this show.
Linda's website here.

Glasgow School of Art: Save Our Ceramics Department

Monday 24th March 2008
The following is a statement from ceramics students as Glasgow School of Art:

New undergraduates will not now be accepted either for the full-time Ceramic degree course or for the part time course at the Glasgow School of Art. This is the end of undergraduate ceramic education in Scotland.
Following a recommendation by the Head of the School of Design, this decision, taken in haste without any staff or student consultation will have major implications for Scottish design, culture and tourism.
As ceramic students of GSA, we feel passionately that there is a promising future for ceramics in Scotland and are disappointed that GSA lacks the vision and courage to support a profitable and innovative element of the design school.

Their campaign networking group is on facebook
here
Links to petitions here and
here.
Its all very simple and quick and its a brilliant campaign so please suppport them!
And for any of you who have resisted the charms of facebook, this is your chance to breach its hallowed boundaries and you will find that its full of top flight ceramics gubbins.

‘Scared of being branded a “feminist”’

Friday March14th 2008
Branded? Can we just run that one past again? Branded? Who exactly is being branded here? Owch!
What is so frightening, so scorchingly terrifying, about someone thinking or saying you’re a feminist, that it counts as ‘branding’? It isn’t just a ‘figure of speech,’ it’s a profoundly emotive word. How could being considered a feminist possibly feel that bad? That frightening?
Why are artists, of almost any sort, so afraid of what this word means?

Ok, let’s try this out.
Let’s consider what really is frightening:
Being beaten half to death by your husband/ boyfriend/ ex-boyfriend/ father/ brother/ pimp/ dealer/ landlord/ mother’s husband/ boyfriend/ pimp/ dealer etc./ Yes. All of those, they’re all terrifying, and so is the threat of any one of them.
Being raped. Be it by ‘friend’/ boyfriend/ husband/ employer/ stranger/ all the rest etc. Yes. Unquestionably.
Attempting to report any of the above to the police, dealing with the Criminal Justice System and with predatory journalists. Yes.
Being scared of an impending home office visit, of the bang on the door at 5.00 am and finding the immigration police. Yes. Of deportation. Yes, be absolutely terrified.
Of Mahmood Ahmedinejad, the Guardian Council and the religious police. Yes. Of solitary confinement, interrogation and torture. Yes.
Approaching the check-point of the occupying army. Yes. Of landmines, of “precision” bombing, of ‘collateral damage,’ of snipers, of artillery fire from the surrounding hills, of car bombs, suicide bombers, death squads, partisan militias. In short of all forms of male violence, and in particular the organised, militarised sort. Yes. BE VERY VERY SCARED INDEED.

Of the aids test coming out positive. Yes. It is frightening. Of Alzheimer’s, of your sight or hearing or movement becoming impaired, changing, going. All dealable with to be sure, but all scary, especially at first and if it’s wholly unexpected.

Of being stuck up a big mountain on your own, at night. Of being in a desert without water. Of walking barefoot down a dry riverbed in Australia. JUST DON’T DO IT.

There are a thousand things to be scared of. Some truly terrifying. Some beyond the scope of what we can reasonably deal with. Others, scary at first, then become part of being normal.

But the lady at the laundrette thinking you might be a feminist? The shopkeeper thinking the same? Your daughters maths teacher suspecting a hint of radicalism perhaps? Someone asking if your work’s feminist? Or saying it is. Or writing it?
I’M SORRY. NO. If just doesn’t figure.

What kind of state of mass psychosis have we arrived in if we really are more scared of the woman who shouts about being raped, than we are of the suited gentleman (or the hooded gang) who raped her?

There will now a follow a couple of minute’s silence while we contemplate this state of intergalactic derangement.

Investigating ‘The Feminine.’

Saturday March 15th 2008.
‘The feminine’ has been lurking in the long grass of the artist statement for some years now. I happened upon it again on Thursday night, at the opening night of 'Myths and Legends' at Contemporary Applied Bonnets and Silk Scarves in Percy St, London. (Oh yes. I get around.)
Clustered together there, like so many little Easter bunnies, was a cell of 'the Feminine.' I decided to chase them out and see what could be made of them.
I’ve used this expression, and I’ve found it used a few times by makers talking about their work, but what do we mean by it?
I use a very simple definition which is ‘characteristic of woman.’ This means pretty much anything from blistering fury or ‘well ‘ard,’ to any of those gentle nurturing characteristics which are supposed to be found in abundance among females. Thing is, you can’t nurture without getting into a state of blistering rage or being well ‘ard as well. They’re part of each other’s territory.
‘Feminine’ can also mean that peculiarly sanitised, diminished, bleached, washed out, enfeebled version of woman – the sort that never gets angry, doesn’t smell of anything except soap, doesn’t bleed, except her heart of course, and the reason you’ve never met her is because she doesn’t exist, and never has. She is, of course, just a construct. So we can discard her for now. Actually how about forever?
A third use of the word seems to be creeping slowly into accepted-use status. ‘Concerned with "the feminine"’ seems to be – SHUDDER- the acceptable face of feminism. Feminism was never meant to have an acceptable face. THAT’S THE WHOLE POINT. But it does appear to be used by women, mostly, whose work or activities are obviously influenced or in some way shaped by feminist thinking, but who for some inexplicable reason, don’t want to say so and instead opt for something which is, apparently, more acceptable. Nicer. Problem is, if you return to the simple linguistic definition, ‘characteristic of woman,’ it isn’t any ‘nicer,’ just womanly.

'The Human Condition'

Since we’re now investigating the more squalid reaches of the above mentioned long grass, could we now discard this one too… forever? If anyone writes in muttering flakily about ‘the human condition,’ I SHALL enable the moderator. You have been warned. We shall have no more of this sort of nonsense, not on this blog anyway, because, it doesn’t mean anything. There is no ‘human condition.’ Our conditions are not universal. They never were. And I’m a fully paid up, hard-core, structuralist, which is how I know there are no universally shared human conditions. The impossibly complicated web of social and political structures, which enmesh our lives, forbids the existence of such a beast.

More on The C Word's purpose

Next posting, same day, more on The C Word’s purpose.
Interviews:
The Crafts Council – the ultimate C word – What is it good for? This, I hope, will be the first official in-depth C Word interview. I’ll keep you posted.
Next, I very much want all of you to write in and tell The C Word about your projects, shows, happenings, research. Yes, that’s ALL of you. Be you pit-firing in tipis, or hard-core theorising in isms, I want to know about ALL OF IT, especially students/learners, and above all, I want to hear from Feminists, pro-feminists and might-be-feminists and what you’re working on. Just one request – keep it short, say 2-300 words in the first instance. If some really chewy stuff comes back I might start another sister blog, or I’ll find a way of re-routing the weightier stuff, so it’s got its own grazing area. We’ll see.
Ah yes, The C Word does lean towards ceramics, in fact it’s pretty much exclusively about ceramics so far, and yes that is one its primary purposes. This is the bit I want to kick off first. The rest will come, and if it doesn’t, then that is because matters ceramicy are absorbing all my energy for now. As above: we’ll see.
Finally, I plan to continue reviewing events, and new writing on ceramics and anything else that looks interesting.
Links now live, and some more to be tracked down. will eventually upload some pictures on to the site to pretty it up a bit.

Ceramic Art London, Feb 29 - March 2nd 2008

Ceramic Art London, website here is a big posh pottery fair that takes place in the Dinosaur Paddock at the back of the Natural History Museum, in what was once another of the C word’s temples: the Royal Palace of Applied Yawns. It’s an iffy looking 70s building between Kensington Bore and the Consorting Princes, nuzzling up to Prince Albert and the Royal Organ. You can look at the A-Z and see for yourself. Well, imagine my surprise, to find, once again, the White Rabbit lurking in the undergrowth, looking much more sprightly this time though and no sooner had I spotted him, than I heard the Giant Dormouse was shortly, ok tally, to be expected - you know a girl can start to feel stuck in an action replay glitch at these events after a while.

Back at the fair however, the worker bees were at their many splendoured stalls. CAL is pretty much either domestic scale pots, or domestic scale figures. There are a couple of exceptions, - I’m coming to them, - but in the main it’s pots and figures. There is something weirdly interesting about ceramic figures, as long as they’re not trying to be – well – arty. It’s the unapologetically ceramicy ones that seem to work. I mean like china figurines, a bit camp. I’m thinking of Craig Mitchell’s shiney shiney pottery characters, website here and Carole Windham’s trophy-like ‘ornaments’, website here both of which are satires, I suppose, and self consciously refer to mantelpiece figures. I certainly prefer them to the earnest ‘truth to materials’ brigade – ‘female’ figures with no bosoms – I’m sorry I just can’t be doing with that sort of thing. Happily, neither could the selectors at CAL, it seems, at any rate they weren’t there – hooray! Or maybe they’ve just gone out of fashion. Even bigger Hooray.
This posting is going to celebrate inconsistency, because the ‘earnest truth to materials’ pots were out in force and I loved them. Gareth Mason’s giant placenta and toothpaste blobs oozed – I think he’s finding his feminine self, or the pot’s feminine self, and Richard Phethean’s big earthenware gestural jugs - um – thrusted – yep, masculine, but in the most cheerful sort of way. (Pictures on CAL website, more links to be added.)
The post-modern strand was admirably represented by Philomena Pretsell – welcome back- whose stall sported a fine collection of her pastry-folded domestic table-ware/ display-ware with lots of gold and drawings on so you’re not in any doubt at all about its desire to decorate- with brass knobs on. It’s aggressively feminine – HOORAY x 100 – with anxious moments, sort of flickering. Quite menopausal really, which is probably why I liked it so much. It’s those purple patches that do it, and a fiercely counter-intuitive smudge on the rim of a yellow cup where she’s brushed something on that’s come out brownish, and you know it’s a really bad lipstick moment. LOVE IT. (Pictures on CAL website and above)
It’s difficult to avoid a beauty parade with this kind of gig, because in many ways that’s exactly what it is, Ceramics’s annual fashion show. It’s not representative, it doesn’t show installation or architectural work, or any of the mixed media or cross-disciplinary work, so it’s a glimpse of some of what goes on in contemporary ceramics, rather than a survey, but no worse for that. The CPA, - there goes another C word, this is the Craft Potters Association – awards a prize, which went to a very sleek selection by Carina Ciscato, so, not to be left out, The C Word will award some prizes too.
Drum Roll:
The winner of this year’s, inaugural, Golden Fanny plus rosette for Best in Show 2008 goes to Aneta Regel Deleu,
website here for her truly fabulous blistered, pitted, festering, glorious mint green, yellow and red confections, neither pot nor figure , which lied about the materials, and established a different set of truths. GORGEOUS.
Highly Commended Golden Fanny rosettes go to Gareth Mason and to Philomena Pretsell, who celebrated the feminine from opposite ends of the ceramic spectrum.

Now all I have to do is persuade the Temple of the Applied Arts – that’s the one NEXT to the Natural History Museum to host the award ceremony sometime. This ambition will have to wait though, because The C Word has other matters to attend to.