- Home Exhibition EXHIBITION: No Boundaries | Contemporary Canadian Ceramic
Presentation & preview
10 – 26 November
Exhibition goes live at 10am on 10 November
For the last number of years Messums has taken a lead role among our major private art galleries in promoting the ceramic arts. This has been realised through an innovative exhibition programme, one important thread of which has been exhibitions on national ceramic cultures. Korean and British ceramic have both been subject of ground-breaking shows. The focus now is on Canada, a collection being previewed in our London gallery and exhibited in full at our Wiltshire gallery in 2022.
The Canadians have been a major force in the international ceramic field for decades. It is important establish this up-front, as there has been a tendency to see the enormous and wonderful vortex that is North American art as a single giant entity, which Canada somehow blends into. While the exchange between the two countries is obviously real and intimate, there is also something very particular about Canadian practice, which differentiates it from the rest.
It isn’t that the work has a common style or technique – just the opposite perhaps, it is tremendously diverse – but that there are characteristics within Canadian ceramic that endow it with a distinct ethos. Having traversed that vast nation frequently over the years, for me, three things stand out. First, and most obvious, there is a commitment to technical excellence that goes beyond the individual maker: it is a national obsession. No doubt this relates to the powerful schools of art and design that range across the country. There is a powerful commitment to ceramic, for example, at NSCAD University (Nova Scotia), ACAD (Alberta), Sheridan College (Ontario), and Emily Carr (British Columbia). Second, the Canadians have a tendency toward narrative – story-telling and writing – that parallels and reflects another extraordinary living heritage: literature. In the last fifty years, Canada has provided us with a significant number of the world’s greatest novelists, such as Margaret Atwood, Michael Ondaatje, Yann Martel, Carol Shields, Mordecai Richler, Rohinton Mistry, Lawrence Hill, Alistair MacLeod, and many others. There is something in the Canadian DNA that drives this, and it spills over into the ceramic world. And thirdly, the Canadians tend towards intellectual curiosity. The artists see ceramic as a vehicle for ideas, as a means of exploring issues well beyond the walls of the pottery and craft centre. They have no problem understanding that what they do is art in the most profound sense, and has a beautiful complexity to it.
The three artists in this ground-breaking exhibition, for the UK, Walter Ostrom, Greg Payce, and Linda Sormin, demonstrate these three traits. They also represent several generations, and all of them enjoy international reputations. Interestingly, they are also or have been committed teachers.
Over the last five decades, Walter Ostrom, has been one of the most plural thinkers within production and education, anywhere. He is a legendary promoter of studio pottery as a profession. While acknowledging classic studio pottery – he has championed the development of ceramic history – he has also been at the forefront of introducing Conceptualist approaches to ceramic practice. He is as at home with Donald Judd, Sol Lewitt and Joseph Beuys, as he is Michael Cardew and Bernard Leach.
Greg Payce lives in Calgary, Alberta, and was Professor of ceramic at ACAD for decades, before stepping back to concentrate purely on his work. Through the decades he has developed a superb form of trompe l’oeil that is entirely his own, in which thrown vessels, sometimes in pairs,
sometimes in rows, appear to have standing figures between them. In his work, people fill the voids. In this way, his art gives us one of the most poetic and timeless visions of the relationship of people to pots. He has made for us an essay on the intimacy of ceramic to civilization.
Linda Sormin is a professor at New York university, but no less Canadian for that. More than anyone engaged in the medium, over the last decades she has pushed ceramic into wholly new terrain, in which the vessel disappears to be replaced by networked clouds of coloured threads and pipes. She integrates into the clay components broken fragments of things, discarded and disowned detritus, and pieces of writing, to create linear, open sculptural works that resemble neurological structures. This is probably a most appropriate analogy: her process of searching, collecting, and assembling seems to be geared to the capturing of the ephemeral: incidents and moments that have gone, leaving behind only fragments of evidence. She describes her outlook:
To make space for new discovery in any particular place or situation, how might I loosen my grip on language and methodology? Where is there opportunity to reshape my material, visual, spatial, conceptual and kinetic expectations? Research includes scavenging, collecting, disassembling and rebuilding fragments into new forms.
Three artists representing three generations, and all at the forefront of global ceramic practice. This is a fair representation of Canadian ceramic art at this time.
Paul Greenhalgh, September 2021
Linda Sormin (b.1971) lives and works in New York City, and is Associate Professor of Studio Art at New York University. She has taught ceramics at Emily Carr University, Rhode Island School of Design, Sheridan College and Alfred University. Born in Bangkok, Sormin moved to Canada with her family at the age of five. She has a BA in English Literature and worked in community development for four years in Thailand and Laos. She studied ceramics at Andrews University (BA, English Literature, 1993), Sheridan College (Ceramics Diploma, 2001) and Alfred University (MFA, Ceramic Art, 2003).
Through sculpture and site-responsive installations, Sormin explores fragility, tension, migration, survival and change. Her unconventional approach has pushed ceramic into a wholly new terrain, in which the vessel disappears to be replaced by networked clouds of coloured threads and pipes. She integrates into the clay components of broken fragments, discarded and disowned detritus, and pieces of writing, to create linear, open sculptural works that resemble neurological structures. This is probably a most appropriate analogy: her process of searching, collecting, and assembling seems to be geared to the capturing of the ephemeral: incidents and moments that have gone, leaving behind only fragments of evidence. She describes her outlook:
“To make space for new discovery in any particular place or situation, how might I loosen my grip on language and methodology? Where is there opportunity to reshape my material, visual, spatial, conceptual and kinetic expectations? Research includes scavenging, collecting, disassembling and rebuilding fragments into new forms.”
Sormin’s work has been exhibited nationally and internationally, most recently at United Contemporary (Toronto, ON), Patricia Sweetow Gallery (San Francisco, CA) and Ferrin Contemporary (North Adams, MA). She was a participant at the European Ceramic Workcentre in the Netherlands this year, creating new work for three exhibitions: “Ceramics in the Expanded Field: Sculpture, Performance and the Possibilities of Clay”, at MASS MoCA, North Adams, MA; Peach Corner Gallery in Copenhagen, Denmark opening in 2022; and Messums Wiltshire.
Linda Sormin
Linda Sormin
Linda Sormin
Greg Payce lives and works in Calgary, Alberta and was Professor of Ceramics at the Alberta College of Art and Design (ACAD) before stepping back to concentrate purely on his work. Raised in Edmonton, Payce’s interest in ceramics began in his early years when he knew from the age of six that he wanted to be a potter. From that time onwards he engaged with the medium which eventually led to a BFA from the University of Alberta in 1977 with a minor in anthropology and, in 1987, an MFA from the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design in Halifax (now NSCAD University).
Through the decades he has developed a superb form of trompe l’oeil that is entirely his own, in which thrown vessels, sometimes in pairs, sometimes in rows, appear to have standing figures in the negative space between them. In his work, people fill the voids. In this way, his art gives us one of the most poetic and timeless visions of the relationship of people to pots. He has made for us an essay on the intimacy of ceramic to civilization.
Payce has been making ceramics for over 55 years and has exhibited his work in over 30 solo, and over 150 group exhibitions in Canada and abroad. Examples of his work are held in numerous public and private collections. His practice has been reviewed in over fifty publications and he has presented lectures and workshops nationally and internationally.
In 2012 his exhibition Greg Payce: Illusions was held at the Gardiner Museum in Toronto which was followed in 2013 by receiving the Governor General’s Award for Media and Visual Arts – Saidye Bronfman Award for Fine Craft. In 2015, Payce retired from teaching at The Alberta University of the Arts and is currently Professor Emeritus at the Alberta College of Art and Design. He recently completed a Canada Council senior artist grant to undertake research, make studio work for exhibitions, and present lectures on his practice internationally. In 2018 he held a Solo Exhibition of his work with Art Mur Gallery in Berlin. His work was recently featured on the cover of Ceramic: Art and Civilization by Paul Greenhalgh.
Q. How did you initiate your practice? What has been your background / training and how influential has that subsequently been?
I am one of those fortunate people who discovered very early in life what I was passionate about and have followed it ever since.
I have a very strong memory of seeing a television program when I was about 5 yrs old showing a man throwing a pot on the wheel. I remember thinking that it was magic and wanted to try it. I began by digging up local earthenware clay from behind our fence and started making things by hand out of it. I had no access to any kilns and used leftover paint-by number oil paints to finish the work. My next memory is of making a bear out of clay in the third grade. It was painted with tempera paint and shellac.
I first began seriously making ceramics when I was in high school. I had a wonderful teacher, Bertha Martin who gave me my first lesson on the potters wheel. I spent all of my lunch hours practising on the wheel and apparently had a good aptitude. One of our neighbours had a kiln and I saved up to by a wheel and would make things in the basement and she would fire them for me. I began selling works in local craft fairs. Below is my first thrown pot in high school.
I enrolled in B.A program at out University and took all the fine art courses that I could. Unfortunately at the time, the Art/Craft divide was strong and I was not permitted to make vessel based work in the courses, only sculptural. This did not stop me and I continued to make pots at home. After my undergraduate degree I got a position as technician and instructor at a community Ceramics program and worked there for a couple of years. All the time I was making work and honing my skills and conceptual parameters. I was also teaching ceramics classes and learned that I really enjoyed teaching.
Another important Canadian ceramist, John Chalke was an early teacher at Uni. He taught me the value of giving titles to work. All of my work from the past thirty years is titled. I found that this can give a clue or prompt to viewers, not to explain the work but to illuminate some aspect of how I see the work. He also taught me that humour was also an important thing and that it was a device to bring people into the work as well.
After that, I was fortunate to go the Banff Centre and was a resident for two winters as a studio artist and further developed my ceramics. It was a very international program and I learned so much and met so many important individuals in the medium. I was also very exposed to other current contemporary artists and made a couple of trips to New York to see all kinds of contemporary art. This gave me the impetus to apply to graduate schools, as I knew that and M.F.A was the credential that I needed to teach in post secondary institutions.
In my research I found that the only Canadian Art school that had an M.F.A program in Ceramics that supported pottery was the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design. The school was a very well known for its support of Ceramics and was also hotbed of early conceptual art practices. I was interested in that as much as I was interested in Ceramics. The head of the program was Walter Ostrom.
The experience at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design was seminal for my development as a ceramist. The pedagogy there was far more critical and was centred more around issues of history, concept and context that I had been exposed to previously. Walter was the first teacher I had that showed me the material and social history of Ceramics. This really opened my eyes and let me to see the rich conceptual possibilities of the medium. I discovered that ceramics had its own long and rich history and an evolving contemporary discourse. I saw this as a springboard for future practice.
I began teaching at the Alberta College of Art and Design in 1988 and remained there until my retirement in 2015. I think that all of these earlier experiences affected how I taught. Form, concept and context, criticism, and history are all equally important.
Q. Can you tell me more about the subject matter of your work?
I think that the statement I sent you mostly covers this but some more things are:
I have always been interested in optical illusions. Most people are. If have found that using them in my work is a strategy to draw viewers into my work. As we all know, getting people to look at your and contemplate what is going on is not always easy. I also found that almost all optical illusions are two dimensional and that using them with three dimensional form opened huge new possibilities.
The writing of Steven Johnson has helped to illuminate my practice with his concept of the adjacent present. I first discovered this idea in his book entitled Where Good Ideas Come From. Basically the premise is that when two objects or ideas are placed beside each other, their juxtaposed form, concept or context cannot help but influence viewers’ perceptions and their understanding of how those two things relate to each other. An example is that in one of my negative space works, one can see that there are two vases beside each other and also a figure appears between them. Why is he doing that and what does it mean become the questions.
The writings of Paul Mathieu have strongly influenced me, particularly his text on the profound distinction between images and objects and how they may relate to each other.
I profoundly believe that art is a distinct form of non objective language and has great power as such. When I write about my work I do not try to tell people what my work is about, I try to illuminate it so that viewers may form their own interpretations. Peter Lane once told me that there is a very big difference between representation and expression. I see far too many contemporaries having to employ text or talk to explain works to an audience. I believe that forms, materials and processes have strong powers to convey meaning and express artistic intentions.
I do not generally read art books. I tend to read science, particularly anthropology. I am currently reading a new text entitled The Dawn of Everything by Graber and Wengrow. This book is a radical reinterpretation of human prehistory and presents a profound revision of conventional thought on the development of the supposed origin western thought on post contact ideas of equality and democracy. I find such reading material sets my mind reeling and stimulates ideas for new work.
Q. What is the inspiration behind the specific works in the exhibition and how do they sit within the context of your work to date?
In this particular exhibition, the statement provides general background/inspiration information on the negative space works. For the past fifteen years I have been remediating these sorts of works in video, installation, and lenticular image contexts to expand on the possibilities of using other media to extend the range of my practice.
Transfiguration is the most interesting of the negative space works in the show as it employs the strategy of changing the forms of the front and back vase profiles to produce a tableau of a female changing to a male for and you view the work from left to right.The first image shows the work in a linear format. As you can see the figure in between the vases changes from male to female as the viewer look left to right. This work can be shown on a long plinth in the centre of a room where viewers can walk all around the work. I also used the works in to produce a video entitled Transfiguration Redux that animates these forms on a rotating turntable. I am hoping to include the video along with the actual works in the exhibition.
The Venus and Mars vase pair titles stem from a work that I made in 2005 entitled Conjunction. I was making spherical vases with positive profiles of human form that were intended to be viewed as planets. That particular work was one of my earliest forays into using my ceramics in installation and video contexts. In Venus and Mars I playfully employ colour and the historical western practice of naming of planets after gods.
The striped bulbous vases are from a continuing series of works entitled Blur. For an earlier exhibition I was invited to make a work on the theme of self portraiture. The exhibition organizers were discriminatory about including pottery in the exhibition and I felt that the issue needed addressing. I knew that they wanted a negative space work. I decided to send them a single pot. I made the Blur work in which the profile became highly articulated. The concept was that this vase form was based on the figure (foot, lip, belly, shoulder etc. (self portrait). The highly articulated banded profile blurred the line between figure and vessel, figure and ground, motion and rest, 2-D and 3-D, decoration/ornament etc. I was being cheeky. The titles Slow Disco and Bleur are meant to be humorous.
Q. Have aspects of Canadian life particularly informed your practice?
I discuss this in the next section.
Q. What are your broader views of the current Canadian ceramic scene?
A nagging annoyance is that Canadian art constantly gets lumped in with the Americans. Canada is culturally quite a different country. The cultural scene here is far less market driven than in the U. S. There is really no major commercial art scene in Canada. As a more socially oriented nation, here is much more of a culture of artists working outside of the commercial context in experimental and less populist modes of making. We have a granting system that rewards bold new ideas and nurtures such activity.
In terms of Ceramics there have been some very significant developments that have shaped practice in both Canada and the U. S. Some examples:
Q. What has been the affect of teaching on your practice?
Teaching and working within and academic context has really helped form and propel my practice. As I mentioned earlier, working with students is very fulfilling. Not only does one have the pleasure of watching young minds grow, working with this generation has helped me interpret the world on their terms which is often quite different than the default position I might take otherwise. Teaching is a form of reciprocal communication. I maintain that if I am not learning anything from the students, they are probably not learning much from me.
My faculty position has allowed me to collaborate with other faculty, artists and theorists to understand what I do and to provide fodder for future work. My academic research imperative has allowed me to dream big in terms of my practice and to try new things. Failure is allowed in order to move things forward.
Gregory Payce
Gregory Payce
A major force in the world of contemporary ceramics, Walter Ostrom is Professor Emeritus of the Ceramics department at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design University in Halifax. He is also Honorary Professor of ceramics at the Jingdezhen Ceramic Institute in Jingdezhen, China. Ostrom is regarded internationally as a technical and academic expert in low-fire maiolica production, an ancient ceramic technique that he has personally tailored through innovations and decorative methods to reflect the geography of the places he has lived, be it Canada or China.
Born in 1944 in Binghamton, New York, Ostrom originally studied biology and chemistry at the University of Buffalo, New York (1964-65) and the University of St. Andrews, Scotland (1965-67). He then redirected his career pathway towards ceramics and gained a BA from Wilmington College, Ohio (1967-69) and an MFA from Ohio State University (1969). Following this he received an invitation to teach ceramics and Asian art history at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, Halifax which was highly regarded for its progressive approach.
In the span of his nearly 40-year career, Ostrom has investigated many aspects of ceramics in his work, from experiments in high conceptualism in the 1970s to his current focus on the exploration of the vast history, hybridization and social foundation of ceramics. He has been one of the most plural thinkers within production and education anywhere and is a legendary promoter of studio pottery as a profession. While acknowledging classic studio pottery – he has championed the development of ceramic history – he has also been at the forefront of introducing Conceptualist approaches to ceramic practice. He is as at home with Donald Judd, Sol Lewitt and Joseph Beuys, as he is with Michael Cardew and Bernard Leach. Ostrom’s work has been exhibited throughout Canada, and in Europe, China, Australia and the United States.
Q. How did you initiate your practice? What has been your background / training and how influential has that subsequently been?
I was studying biochemistry at St Andrews and was involved with a kind of radical student group from Dundee who were at the art college and, what is the media for the proletariat? Clay! I was fascinated and wanted to try it.
Clay is accessible at every level of society and that’s been important for me. I got carried away with utility, or to clarify, function. Things can function decoratively, religiously etc or in a utilitarian way but utility is utility and I got carried away with making things for our house. We lived too far away from town to go to parties so we were home all the time and we both cooked and I had been making flower pots out of the local earthenware clay and so it’s just one step over to start making utilitarian pots for the house. So that’s what happened to me.
With utility I got interested in it in the sense of Marxism and notions of use value. The other thing I found really interesting about utility is we have a big traditional cupboard in our house — with big shelves and at the top it holds about 30 pots — and I noticed that a place setting went from 18 pieces to 5. It was modernism so less is more. People wanted their kitchen not to look like a kitchen anymore but they wanted to put all the doors on everything and make it like a laboratory. Who needs great dishes when you’ve got to put them in the cupboard? All you need is a dinner plate, a lunch plate, a bread and butter plate and a bowl — that’s all you really need as opposed to the 18 pieces. And the other thing that was a huge difference with modernism is modernist thinking of truth to materials so everything is brown. If it’s ceramics it’s a minimum of decoration if any, and preferably, none.
Now in my cupboard, as I’m looking at it now, I’ve got a dozen Afghani bowls on it, there’s some Chinese Ming stuff and some Chinese yesterday stuff and Japanese Mino. It was the great awakening for me, that pottery can function in a utilitarian way and also in a decorative way. In the old days when you were not using it people put it on their cupboard shelf, as what else did they have in their house. It really helped my transition getting very interested in decoration. So, then the question becomes what is appropriate decoration, or first, and it’s probably my biochemistry background, of questioning everything. For example, I wanted to make a vase and I thought, what’s an appropriate shape for a vase? A basket. So I’ve forever made vases in the shape of a basket. Then, the question becomes, what’s appropriate decoration? And then that, oh wow, that just takes you all over the world.
The other thing is that I taught Asian art history at my first couple of years at NASCAD, and I’ve always been mentally in love with historical ceramics. I just like it all and I’m interested in it. I don’t see myself as a professional potter, I see myself as somebody who’s interest in pottery and every aspect, you know, I like the empirical breakdowns of clay bodies in that great Iznik book. And one of the main reasons I make pottery is because I can learn more about it.
The soap dish…. it started with the invasion of Iraq and so I made the series and the idea was Lady Macbeth, commemorative soap dish of Lady Macbeth. Commemorative ceramics has always played that role. The first series was called ‘Axis of Evil’, Blair and Bush, and the ones I’m working on now are the same thing, Lady Macbeth and it’s part two, they’re called ‘Palace Time’ and ‘Occupied’ because that’s what they are, they’re plays on American Airbnb, they take these Palestinian houses and rent them. I thought ‘occupied’ means someone already lives in them. And then, the other thing that I’ve been working on forever has been this thing called ‘The jealous potter’ and it stems from a reading, or a mis-reading or an invention of Lévi-Strauss’ book of that name and so they started of at four or five inches.
Q. Can you tell me more about the subject matter of your work?
The subject matter is ceramics. Because I just can’t help it. I’ll pick things up from history which are symbolic. It’s my hobby, it’s what I read.
Q. Have aspects of Canadian life particularly informed your practice?
One might be political, because I am a draft-dodger, and so my politics are leftist and maybe my ‘Axis of Evil’ works are inherently political. What else, oh I married a Canadian! And she has really influenced my practice.
Q. What are your broader views of the current Canadian ceramic scene?
I think there’s some really interesting stuff being made. I really like some of the sculptural stuff, like Linda and Jean-Pierre. And there’s some nice pots going on but my problem is being a teacher for 40 years is when I look at my own work I see what I did wrong, so consequently I can look at a piece and they just often knock you out in museums and things because people are so selective. Out of 4,000 of them they’ve selected the very best piece so I don’t think they should have done that better but my answer would be they should be looking at more art, they should be looking at more ceramic history and to me history also includes contemporary work, but they should be looking more outside of their own backyard. And history is a great way to do it.
Q. What has been the affect of teaching on your practice?
In teaching I had the kids every week and once a day they got two hours of history and theory and I think that’s what made many of our students so good, they could make informed work, not just something that’s been in the home scene. And, I’ve had students who’ve given me some really great crits. Some students become so good they become almost like a colleague. They’ve got such good eyes. The one thing I discovered was that I was a better teacher when I was making more of my own work because I think your eyes are a little bit more developed and you’re picking up on stuff. But I have to tell you, the worst thing that ever happened to me was retiring. I still miss it.
