Welcome to Welcome To My World: ceramics with narrative

This show has been a long time in gestation: the seeds of it were sewn in the basement galleries of the wonderful Scottish Gallery on Edinburgh's commercial gallery heartland, Dundas Street, away from the throngs of festival tourists, in 2010. As an art school graduate with slightly avant-garde and surrealist tendencies combined with a growing interest in contemporary craft, I found myself drawn to Stephen Bird's Industrial Sabotage series. Here were ceramics that had something to say to the audience and titles that made you laugh, almost like an in-joke between the viewer and the artist.

Is laughing allowed in galleries, I wondered at the time?

Over the next couple of years I came across further artists who were crafting their own political, cultural or personal narratives through ceramics: Tony Hayward thanks to the Jerwood Contemporary Makers Prize hosted at Dovecot, where I worked for IC:Innovative Craft in the beautifully renovated Infirmary Street baths in the heart of Edinburgh with its dramatic brand-new exhibition spaces, the work of Paul Scott through the fabulous touring exhibition Taking Time: Craft and the Slow Revolution; Richard Slee’s From Utility To Futility installation in the then new V&A Ceramics galleries; Barnaby Barford’s solo show that toured to the UK from Virginia Museum of Contemporary Art; and the work of Philip Eglin again at The Scottish Gallery. Meanwhile, Grayson Perry’s profile was going stratospheric. 

Suddenly the idea for a show started to flesh out. The styles may differ, the subject matter might be different between the artists, the techniques, scale and approach might vary massively, but there is a common thread stitching them together loosely.  Widely defined you could say this loose thread is the artists’ take on the human condition which is, admittedly, vague, but more specifically all these artists inhabit their own stylistic worlds that they use to present their experiences and ruminations on current affairs, human emotions, and shared cultural histories. Unlike most other art forms, we don’t typically think of ceramics as being a medium that challenges its audience, but these are artists who defy convention, often using the stereotype of ceramic traditions to create their juxtapositions.

Artists undergo long periods of isolation in the studio working up sketches, ideas, characters and getting to know their subject. Like an author writing a novel, makers come to inhabit the stories their work narrates and the characters that populate them.  There is inevitably self-reflection in this process, but it is also driven by a desire for these stories to have an audience, for catharsis, or for their ideas to resonate with others.  It is an intensely emotional process to create and exhibit to total strangers when your subject matter is so intertwined with your personal views and experiences. By being present, by viewing, the audience is directly judging not just the work in front of them, but the artist’s entire life.  

That is why this exhibition is called Welcome To My World – not because it is my world, but because it is theirs, and they have stories worth telling.

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Edited by Sarah McGill

Stephen Bird; Industrial Sabotage - Phase 3; 2010; published by The Scottish Gallery

Tony Hayward; Loving Couple No. 7; 2010; Jerwood Contemporary Makers 2010 @ Dovecot, Edinburgh; photo by Nick Duxbury

Group of objects by Ian Godfrey @ Oxford Ceramics Gallery; 2018; photo by Nick Duxbury