Claudia Clare –
Overlapping Fields:
The meeting of urban and rural influences in Emilie Taylor’s Edgelands.
Few turn to pottery for documentary evidence but there are exceptions. Much of what classicists know about domestic and street life in ancient Athens, for example, has come from studying the painting on Athenian Red and Black Figure Ware. Ancient Athens need not be the exception, however. As one of the dominant domestic arts, pottery contains a rich seam of social history. Received wisdom tells us that reliable historical knowledge is gleaned from written records, supplemented, in modern times, with photographs or film footage. Pottery is used only in the absence of film and photography but it could be investigated as an alternative source because, in its surface imagery, lies vast archive of pictorial information stretching back at least three hundred years. Pottery occupies a unique role in people’s lives and, as such, is a repository of information, much of which is not found elsewhere. This is particularly true of both the urban and rural poor who were not as well able to record their histories in written form as the wealthier and more educated classes.
Imagery on pots falls into roughly three groups: commemorative, activist, and satiric or allegorical. Some ceramic objects are intended to memorialise: coronation mugs would be the obvious example but it is not all kings and queens of England. There are mugs commemorating the 1878 cotton riots in Blackburn and Darwen and bowls recording the journeys of individual tea clippers. There are the personal and local commemorations like the birth of a baby, a wedding, the election of a popular local figure to Parliament, or the unruly behaviour of a local landlord or cleric. ‘Activist’ crockery was intended to infiltrate the kitchen and drawing room and agitate among both the masses and the new middle class. Anti-slavery and temperance ware both were produced with the intention of using everyday domestic objects to support these growing movements for social and political change and to normalise and domesticate their message.
‘Their stern straight lines and solidly symmetrical presence are belied by the lyrical painting of undulating cornfields.’
It should come as no surprise, then, to find contemporary potters continuing this tradition. Emilie Taylor is interpreting a range of local social stories but, in the broadest sense, her work mediates, with great eloquence, the reality of everyday life for girls living on the social periphery. This is not village life, nor is it urban, inner city, or even suburban, which usually indicates some degree of recent prosperity. The point where city meets country is often ill defined and a bit bleak. Edgelands sets out to make this fluid uncertainty into a fixed, freeze-framed, set of images fired into that most durable of art forms, the clay pot.
This is the rarity. Pottery, or contemporary ceramics, tends to be either authentically, proper-pot rural, or self-consciously, achingly, urban. The bit in between has been somewhat overlooked, perhaps reflecting the demographic of the majority of makers. Taylor’s large pot forms have a drain pipe, chimney pot, or industrial chimney feel to them. Urban modernism meets industrial infrastructure. Their stern straight lines and solidly symmetrical presence are belied by the lyrical painting of undulating cornfields.
The historical context to which Taylor’s work might belong is not a singular or uncomplicated. It draws on the social documentary elements of Seventeenth century Staffordshire slipware which record the social attitudes of the period in the messages that adorn it. Those from the years of the Cromwellian Protectorate tend to be pious and moralistic. Later examples, from the Restoration period more cheerful and bawdy. However, Taylor’s work is, strictly speaking, sgraffito ware, rather than slipware in the traditional sense, and this places it closer to the Devon harvest jugs. ‘Sgraffito’ is a reference to etching where the design is scratched through a brushed on layer of slip. The look is dramatically different from the slip-trailed ware of the Staffordshire potters where the lines of the designs and lettering are piped on to the pot much as icing is piped on to a cake. Sgraffito, done with a sharp point, allows a much more precise line than slip-trailing and results in more detailed and energetic drawing.
Visually, Taylor’s work is more reminiscent of the Victorian stoneware, made by the ‘artist potters’ of the nineteenth century. They produced decorative ware from pottery workshops, in a semi-industrial environment, with a division of labour between the maker, who threw the pot on a wheel, and the decorator, usually, but not always, a woman. Pre-eminent among these was Hannah Barlow, who worked at the Doulton Lambeth Pottery in London. Her magnificent sgraffito pots depict animals in landscapes with a virtuosity and understanding of the drawn line that we rarely see in ceramics. Little colour was used in these works. She achieved the sense of distance and perspective purely though varying the weight of the line and a good knowledge of perspective. Taylor too relies on line and perspective far more than on tone or colour. Both women use the banded, header and footer approach to the overall design of their pots, with the complex drawings running around the central band like a frieze and with the perspective zooming into the centre of the pot rather than around its form. While Barlow’s concern was to depict animals in the wild – she did much of her drawing from life – Taylor concerns herself with contemporary social story-telling but also derived from her own life and work.
The result, in both cases, is original work, neither referential nor copied.
‘[Neither] authentically,
proper-pot rural, or
self-consciously,
achingly, urban.’
Taylor, however, is a studio potter. Like the early peasant potters she is in charge of the entire process of making her work but contemporary studio potters no longer mine and prepare their own clay, or build their own kilns, as the earlier, twentieth century ‘pioneer’ studio potters did. What constitutes an authentic studio potter has changed with the demands of the times, health and safety, environmental concerns and, above all, availability of industrially prepared materials. Studio pottery and industrial pottery are largely interdependent now whereas, certainly in the early years, they were almost entirely separate. In the contemporary context, Taylor is at liberty to concentrate on forms and imagery and what they might mean in any given context. The early ‘pioneer’ studio potters were not, such were technical demands of their craft. Studio potters have always been influenced by the industry at least as much as they are by the early ‘peasant’ potters so, although Taylor may not even be aware of Hannah Barlow’s work, that they seem to meet each other across the centuries, aesthetically, if not in narrative terms, is again, not unduly surprising. Had Barlow had access to ready prepared clay and colours and a reliable electric kiln, she too would probably have been a studio potter.