Philip Eglin and Tony Hayward: making is shared

artist focustony haywardphilip eglinart exhibitionceramicscontemporary ceramicscurating

Dec 24

This is a highly unoriginal pairing of artists for this blog, given the artists were paired together 10 years ago at Marsden Woo for the exhibition Double Take and have been friends since the 1980s when they met as students at Royal College of Arts. However, I expect most readers to be familiar with one of these makers and less so with the other.

There is no particularly easy way to sum up Philip Eglin’s output. His pieces range from sets of jugs based on his collection of battered and dented old water cans to large sculptural female forms with slip trail decoration to simple plates with priests and prostitutes applied by decal transfers. His output over his career has been extraordinarily non-linear, even circular when he revisits ideas and forms, building bodies of work that don’t necessarily follow on from the previous pieces. However, when Eglin deploys snapshots of narrative onto his sculptures, buckets and plates, the themes often focus onto the iconography of religion and football, perceived ideas of morality and contemporary throwaway society.

“He is angered by hypocrisy in all its forms, and fascinated by parallels between the church and the new religion, football, where strikers are ordained as role models, then found to be lacking in moral consistency. His pursuit of such themes – sex and money, corruption at the highest levels – follows the tradition of incorporating moralistic inscriptions within Staffordshire flatback figures.”1

Eglin’s sculptures take pleasure in the juxtaposition of ancient and modern with cultural and religious references never too far away; whether it is football and religion in the form of David Beckham, arms joyously outstretched, transferred onto the chest of a crucified Christ or mimicking ancient, wooden, carved sculptures whilst moulding over the ‘golden arches’ of McDonald’s and plastic recycling symbols to form his Madonna and Christ figures. In his Priest and Prostitute dishes, Eglin presents the audience with an image designed to deliberately confront: a priest figure makes the sign of the cross whilst a prostitute sits cross-legged beside him. The tableau brings to mind an exposed confessional booth, but also begs the question: who is listening to whom?

“It is all about religion but not in a narrowly defined sense. Forms and images make overt reference to religious iconography but are transformed through the artist’s probing and reworking in clay into contemporary pieces that transcend any fixed context. Through this shift, or transcendence, Eglin’s work asks interesting questions about how things we value might look in our contemporary world.”2

Meanwhile, Eglin’s huge ‘bucket’ vessels draw the viewer in with a different approach. They are influenced by a different visual language and are far less confrontational – at least initially. The buckets tend to feature either a scaled-up rural scene taken from a print of a historic painting, or a Cranach-inspired figure. However, the first Eglin bucket I ever encountered was in the object store, on loan, at Blackwell, The Arts and Crafts House, when I worked there, and had Cristiano Ronaldo on the side. I don’t really care much for Cristiano Ronaldo, but I instantly moved the bucket to the shelf right in front of the doorway so I could look at it each time I went into the store.

“Unlike the pages of a book, pictures on the wall of a cylindrical pot can be seen in any order… The narrative can have ambiguous open-ended readings, depending on what meets the eye first.”3

“His Pope and Prostitute theme exemplifies Eglin’s delight in the meeting of the spiritual and the explicit, in jarring cultural dichotomies that can speak of unpalatable truths.”4

Unpalatable truths are also confronted alongside the hideous and the nightmarish by Tony Hayward, but for Hayward’s audience they are of a more personal nature, and are more obviously heart-breaking. Hayward is a sculptor who creates frozen scenes, such as his Loving Couples series, where his characters are trapped together for better or worse. Using found mass-produced ceramic figures, Hayward replaces the face of one of the two characters, substituting in a grotesque, binding the two figures together in an awkward moment, thereby transforming the tenor of the scene. In some ways these ‘loving couples’ remind the viewer of what it feels like to look through an embarrassing photo album or old social media memories which confront us with our relationship choices from the past. We may try to cut our ex-lovers out of our photos, but they can reappear with a vengeance.

“Trapped in the intimacy of a floriferous island with a creature of utterly questionable appeal, their responses range from mild bewilderment, to curiosity, to public expressions of long suffering.”5

Hayward’s output is almost as varied as Eglin’s; evolving from sculptural assemblage pieces that spring out of the wall like 3D versions of a Georges Braque still life to mesmerizing 3D versions of romantic landscapes. The latter undulate from a wall, or draw the audience into the landscape in a completely different way, obscuring part of the image or revealing a distant detail. The similarity to how Eglin wraps a landscape around a bucket is strong: both artists play with narrative order, manipulating the viewer, emphasising previously overlooked areas of an images.

“The Loving Couples also begin as found objects, banal figurines accidentally or sometimes deliberately rendered unsaleable by decapitation… What conversations these new couples have, trapped together on their small bucolic islands.”6

I’ve mentioned before that one of Hayward’s Loving Couples was featured in the Jerwood Contemporary Makers 2010 show selected by Freddie Robins, Hans Stofer and Richard Slee, which toured to Dovecot in Edinburgh as part of the IC:Innovative Craft programme that I was working on the same year as Stephen Bird’s Industrial Sabotage – Phase 3 and Richard Slee’s From Utility to Futility at the V&A and the year before Phil Eglin’s Mixed Marriage(s) at Blackwell. These were the exhibitions that the idea for Welcome To My World grew from, but Jerwood Contemporary Makers 2010 actually changed a lot of my views on the craft vs art argument – pieces by Hayward, David Clarke, Emma Woffenden, Laura Ellen Bacon, Conor Wilson, David Gates and Richard Wheater (and all three selectors) rendered that argument moot: it didn’t matter the label; these were just incredible visual artists.

“We don’t need to agonise over the boundaries between ‘art’ and ‘craft’, any more than we should be separating art and life. The boundary is between the creative exuberance of being human, and the monotony of an existence dependent on mass production – objects, food, values, aspiration. Making is personal. Making is shared. Making is a celebration of who we are.”7

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Edited by Sarah McGill

1 – Sara Roberts; Double Take; 2010; Marsden Woo Gallery

2 – Amanda Game; Philip Eglin: Popes, Pin-ups and Pooches; 2009; The Scottish Gallery

3 – Alison Britton; Philip Eglin: Ajar; 2019; Taste Contemporary

4 – David Whiting; Philip Eglin: Mixed Marriage(s); 2011; Lakeland Arts Trust

5 – Sara Roberts; Loving Couples; 2010; Tony Hayward

6 – Sara Roberts; Double Take; 2010; Marsden Woo Gallery

7 – Jeanette Winterson; Jerwood Contemporary Makers; 2010; Jerwood Visual Arts