CHAPTER 3: APPROACH AND RESEARCH METHOD
3.6 DATA GATHERING
3.6.1 Practical experimentation and analysis
Practical research-related activity involved experimenting with impermanent creative work in multifarious ways, mostly utilising clay directly or referencing
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the ceramic heritage. The reflective practitioner regime was utilised to analyse processes and impacts (personal and artistic), and to consider the outcomes of these experimental activities for further analysis and evaluation in the light of further iterations of the research cycle.
This practical work was fundamental to the research method in order to test approaches and enable the development of the personal praxis indicated above, in both the ‘activist’ and the ‘practical’ aspects of the Kolb cycle. Workshop diaries and travel journals (see Appendix 1) were used as an immediate means of capturing reflections-in-action (travel journals in
particular being valuable means of converting record into ‘artful’ evidence as described in Chapter 8).
A number of projects were undertaken within the framework of the research programme (see Appendix 2). While all work was experimental in order to take the research forward, it also contributed to artistic endeavour as an aspect of praxical development (see Chapter 9). This enabled, as intended, a reflective practitioner approach to be adopted. As this was closely connected with the literature and contextual review processes, advantage was taken of the impetus generated in parallel by the theoretical exploration of relevant aspects of the research question and the practical applications (see Diagram 3.2, p.69 and 3.4.1, p.66), to address the aim of developing an individual artistic practice, philosophy and aesthetic, i.e. personal praxis.
The practical work included environmental installation21, gallery-based installation and performance work. Fired ceramic, raw clay, non-ceramic materials, and found objects were utilised. I also experimented with different levels of 'audience' involvement in individual projects, including:
no observer (Losing It Rose Field) witness/recorder (Tidal Transience) gallery visitor (ReCollection)
collaborator and co-producer (Nag Puja)
interested agent given instructions for installation (RePlace Orkney)
21
Making/exposure of work (ceramic and non-ceramic) to tidal, weather and other intervention
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uninvited participant in determining the nature and outcome of work (RePlace)
intervening (active) gallery visitor (Fallacy)
Other experimental work included provision of written instructions for an open-air firing in absentia, broadcast performance and directing a non-clay based performance which have not contributed directly to the thesis and are excluded for the sake of brevity.
Appendix 2 gives detail regarding materials and processes. The reflective activity, related to making, generated themes which were then incorporated into data collection for the selected artists (see Appendix 3.ii).
The early themes generated as persistently – if variously – important both personally and for case study subjects were:
- natural forces - location/site - audience engagement - performativity - evidence/record - private/public art - material as medium - impermanence as message 3.6.2 Data gathering: interviews
The breadth of the initial contextual review enabled currently active artists, using impermanence in some form in their work with clay, to be identified. The identification process involved reviews of journal articles, gallery publicity and informal networking; a deliberately loose description of ‘impermanence’ was used to identify the work of individual artists (see Chapter 4 for early discussion of its features), resulting in a range of approaches being identified, including performance, environmental and gallery-based work.
All those approached agreed to participate in interviews regarding their individual involvement with impermanence as a means of artistic expression (see Appendix 3.i for the methodological basis).
Interviews were undertaken with five artists, using a checklist, developed with the assistance of David Cushway who kindly undertook a pilot, and the
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discussion was recorded with their permission. Interviews lasted
approximately 45 minutes. Each interviewee indicated willingness to provide additional information and was given a copy of the transcription of the
interview, and offered the opportunity to edit, amend or veto any of the content. No changes were requested.
Review and analysis of transcripts of the interviews enabled refinement of themes, and areas requiring further data gathering (e.g. to explore the development of ceramic reference and other expressive media in their work, while their commitment to ceramic remained central).
As it was impractical to undertake interviews in person with the remaining artists due to lack of opportunity, data was gathered regarding their artistic practice and attitudes to impermanence by other means, including written responses to prompt questions and unstructured discussion. Each artist indicated willingness for further contact.
Data gathering from case study subjects enabled themes of specific interest to be refined, which relate also to themes emerging from reflective practice. The focus for the analysis, discussed in Chapters 4-8, relates to aspects whose significance emerged from both sets of data gathering:
Characteristics of, and attitudes towards, impermanence Materiality
Site and placement Audience and witness Performativity
Recording art practice
Data was also gathered to illuminate curatorial perspectives on the exhibition and conservation of impermanent ceramic work, whether installatory,
performative or static in nature.
The curators identified for case study purposes (see Table 3.B) were interviewed using a similar model to the interviews with artists (Appendix 3.iii), with parallel opportunities to edit, amend or veto content. As indicated in 3.5, pp.73-73, this material was not analysed for the thesis, because – while valid – it was too extensive for inclusion. Similarly, no changes were requested. The curatorial perspectives explored were varied: the Customer Services Manager who adopted and protected the research-based
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installation at Bede’s World: the curator of decorative arts with a particular interest in British Studio ceramics at YMT; the curator responsible for
contemporary ceramic and jewellery collections, whose responsibilities also covered contemporary art at MIMA; and the chief and deputy curators at DOM responsible for the Traces exhibition.
3.6.3 Data gathering: secondary research
Initial consideration of the primary data (both personal and case study-based) enabled common features of interest to be identified which were then applied to work by selected contemporary ceramic artists, utilising direct experience of their work, and secondary data in the form of monographs, exhibition catalogues, reviews and critiques.
Relevant exhibitions, performances and installations likely to illuminate the research questions and assist the development of the hypotheses were visited during the research programme, including:
- exhibitions - presentations - writings - broadcasts - conferences - colloquia - festivals22
The approach sought to identify phenomenographically the perceptions and social constructs of those involved intimately with the generation,
presentation and reception of impermanent contemporary ceramic work. The findings from this subjective and selective approach are discussed alongside the analysis of primary research data in Chapters 4-8.
As providing evidence of impermanent work in physical form has been a persistent research issue in relation to transient art practice involving clay, consideration of issues of evidence and record are made the particular subject of Chapter 8. This also impacted on the nature of non-written presentation at oral examination, leading to a decision to utilise the ‘viva exhibition’ to offer an exposition of the traces of work and experiment rather than an exhibition of completed projects, consistent with the spirit of the practice-led, rather than practice-based, research approach.
22
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As indicated in 3.1, pp.57-58, the research method was adopted as an appropriate means of exploring and critiquing aspects of impermanence in my practice in the context of peers working in a similar mode with clay.
Diagram 3.3 Method of research learning (see Diagram 3.1 for Kolb original)
The research method was deliberately experimental and testing: of materials, processes, production, and both creative and analytical self. Iterations of the cycle (Diagram 3.3) enabled learning and understanding to be reviewed and adapted in the light of experience, analysis, contextualisation, modelling and testing in a reflexive format.
The programme was a cyclical journey with practice at its core, opportunities being taken (see subsequent chapters) to compare praxical development both with theoretical models and the practice of peers.
Chapter 3 has described the approach and methods adopted as appropriate for the practice-led research programme, developed to enable the
boundaries between creative practice and theoretical analysis to be navigated, while enhancing both modes of working with the least possible disruption to either. Imperman- ence PRACTICE TO PRAXIS Material Audience Engagement Place Active Experimentation Abstract Concept-
ualisation Concrete Experience
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The findings from the application of the contextualised practice-focused approach are discussed in Chapters 4-9, and a variety of theoretical models are described as means to interpret this mode of artistic expressivity.
These chapters describe and discuss features of impermanence in
contemporary ceramic art practice, identified from examination of my own practice and that of selected ceramic artists working in a similar mode, in order to clarify the nature of impermanence in contemporary ceramic art practice.
Firstly, the nature of impermanence as identified in contemporary ceramic art practice is discussed in Chapter 4.
79 CHAPTER 4: IMPERMANENCE
To be reminded that physical matter is simultaneously indestructible and entirely transmutable: that it can swap states drastically, from vegetable to mineral or from liquid to solid. To attempt to hold these two contradictory ideas in the brain at the same time is usefully difficult, for it makes the individual feel at once valuable and superfluous…. Such knowledge grants us a kind of comfortless immortality: an understanding that our bodies belong to a limitless cycle of dispersal and reconstitution.
Macfarlane (2007, p.173)
Chapters 1-3 explored the focus, purpose and motivation for the research programme, gave an overview of relevant aspects of contemporary
impermanent ceramic art practice, provided the research context, outlined the approach adopted as appropriate for a practice-led doctoral programme and argued for a specific new paradigm research method building on a combined Schönian/Kolbian model.
Chapter 4 considers impermanence in contemporary ceramic art practice and offers a means of classifying it. In this context, it describes and reflects on work generated as part of the research, and that of case study artists, using a classification system devised for the purpose.
4.1 INTRODUCTION
4.1.1 What is ceramic impermanence?
Contrasts are useful in situating my work with clay. It is not vessel-based (although arguably the frequently used egg form can be seen as a vessel). Nor is it iconoclastic: it is not ‘the destruction of the artwork to make way for the new (regime, political thought, religious order, movement in art)’ in Gray’s terms (2013, p.10). In exposing work to other forces, and not protecting it in a museum case, it may be destroyed, but that is not essential. The aim is not to overturn a world-view through a violent embrace of destruction – rather to stimulate other ways of understanding the world. Indeed, the intention is, much like Sullivan’s, for ‘verisimilitude or “trust likeness”… a compound of coherence and pragmatic utility’. (Sullivan, 2005, p.49)
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Chapter 1 introduced means by which my personal practice uses clay
impermanently for the purposes of creative expressivity. This chapter reviews the various ways in which impermanence was explored during the research programme to identify its characteristics as the basis for comparison with work of other contemporary practitioners. In my work impermanence generally takes the form of alteration or disintegration, somewhat less than shocking in its destructive or iconoclastic capacity.
I frequently use raw clay in my practice, including liquid slip, one of the most elusive forms of clay, in which the material is amorphous and ambiguous, challenging the capacity of resulting work to be an object with formal
qualities. Return to Koshi (Figure 4.1, see also 6.2.4, p.148) was the briefest work undertaken, an unannounced, site-related, seconds-long, live event (site-sensitivity is discussed in Chapter 6).
Figure 4.1 Sarah Gee slip-trailing. Return to Koshi, approx. 2l brick clay slip. Saptakoshi River, Nepal. 08.05.11. Image © Dr. H. S. Baral
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Raw clay is also press-moulded, as in Converse:Mao (Figure 4.2), a multi- site environmental installation (see also 6.1.1, pp.133-134 and Figure 6.1) scattered through two provinces of the People’s Republic of China.
Figure 4.2 Press-moulded heads for Converse:Mao. Various raw clay bodies. Elements approx. 1¼x2¼x¾” each. Use of various clay bodies (differences in behaviour of material evident in clarity of the features). 2014.
Fallacy of Mass Production, in the Traces installation (Chapter 6, and further
discussed in 5.1, pp.110-113), also involved press-moulded clay bodies – some raw, some biscuit-fired, and some high- and glaze-fired (Figure 4.3) – piled in a heap and accessible to the public for physical interaction.
Work is also made in which impermanence or transience occurs as a result of external forces, whether human, as in RePlace, where fired and raw clay was involved (see 5.2, pp.117-118), natural (Tidal Transience, with high-fired non-clay ceramic material), or a combination of these (as in ReCollection, again using non-clay material with bone china slip, which was high-fired in a reducing atmosphere) both described further in 4.4, pp.104-105.
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Figure 4.3 Sarah Gee Fallacy of Mass Production. Various fired and raw clay elements (see text for Installation for detail). Variable: 22½”x5” (max.) Traces exhibition, Durham Oriental Museum. July–November 2014.
Macfarlane (2007) encapsulates the enigma of impermanence in the chapter head quotation (p.79). In speaking of nature and our relationship with it, his reflection on impermanence sums up my attitude to it as a form of artistic expression. However often it is presented, transient creativity seems to have a capacity to intrigue, even puzzle and annoy, those coming in contact with it. Rodgers (2014) reflects this response in a review of a recent gallery-based impermanent installation:
Here’s an exhibition for the existentially troubled: Swiss artist Karin Lehmann created an homage to decay this year with
Sediment Sampling… The pots were filled with water and
allowed to crack and fall apart into a puddle of formless clay. The reason I’m not hiding under my bed right now is because the decay portion of the piece calms me down a little. I like the idea of Lehmann investing so much time into shaping these vessels only to hand the keys of the exhibition to Chaos for the remaining half of it. Dematerialization, unmanaged by Lehmann, is shaping these works as well and the callous randomness of it still holds beauty and purpose.
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The essentials of Lehmann’s piece in this New York exhibition are raw clay, vessel forms and introduced water. The vessels degraded during the
exhibition period and the work is no longer a physical entity. Clare Twomey’s
Is it madness Is it beauty (IIMIIB), first created in 2010, has similarities – and
like Lehmann’s work, is not iconoclastic in Gray’s terms (Gray, 2013). It involves human performers introducing water to raw clay vessels and dealing with the consequences over several days (see Chapter 8, also
http://www.siobhandavies.com/work/component/it-madness-it-beauty-clare-
twomey).
Why would artists wish to work in this way? As described on her website, Lehmann:
does not aim for the spectacular or monumental or narrative. Inspired by minimal art… she is interested in the processual and in treating the source material ‘at eye level’. In this way Karin Lehmann achieves immediate and yet subtle transformations that are open to interpretation. Munter (2013)
In contrast, IIMIIB (see Figure 5.2) is described as ‘a performance that
explores the relationship between repetitive actions and the desire to achieve within the human condition’23
, while Twomey said in briefing performers (06.03.15) ‘within this work it examines what hope brings, what failure brings and the determination to continue exploring that’. (As a human performer, working to the artist’s precise script of movements, tasks and timing, the experience of being part of what was essentially a tableau drew out
interesting relationships in the interaction between bone china and human performers. Rather than hope, the persistent acts of filling and mopping emphasised the futility of the task in the face of the predictably unpredictable behaviour of the material.)
Raw material is not the sole way in which contemporary makers use ceramic impermanently. David Cushway’s Plate Spinner: Spode (considered in Chapter 8) used fired plates, which shattered on a concrete floor (Figure 4.4).
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on the display-board for the piece, Shipley Art Gallery, March 2015. See video clip: https//vimeo.com/123665322
84 Cushway explains:
the focus of the work was about the ludicrous act of trying to balance plates, to spin plates, and the fact that you are immediately aware of the outcome the minute it starts. You know what’s going to happen to those plates, eventually. And I think that’s one of the more important aspects of the work really… You are aware of the outcome before it’s happened. But it still
manages to hold people’s attention. Cushway (Interview. 10.11.10, Appendix 5).
Figure 4.4 David Cushway Plate Spinner (Spode), BCB 2011, Spode Works
Jeppe Hein’s 2003 gallery piece Do Not Touch the Artwork (see
http://www.attesedizioni.org/eng/artisti_designer/hein/page_01.html) similarly
involved the shattering of pre-fired plates, in this instance through the
triggering of an infrared beam when visitors approached closely. Gray (2013, p.32) cites Kirsty Bell describing Hein’s work as ‘jolting the spectator out of complacent assumptions by enabling the art object to answer back, so to speak, or even to initiate the conversation’ (issues of material agency are
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discussed in Chapter 6), while the Saatchi Gallery website24 considers that ‘Jeppe Hein’s interactive works playfully remind viewers of their vital part in activating art’s communicative potential’: audience involvement is discussed in detail in Chapter 8.
Where statements of intent are available, purposes in making impermanent works involving clay demonstrably differ from maker to maker. Both primary and secondary research (e.g. Appendix 5, also Chapter 2) indicate that there are as many ways in which ceramic practitioners wish to invest meaning in such work with clay as for artists in other spheres of creative activity. Early in the research programme the importance of identifying key
characteristics of work being studied was recognised, to enable discussion of the particularity of individuals’ work, their aims and its impact. The resulting classification incorporates contemporary modes of working and presentation identified in personal and others’ practice, forming the basis of Table 4.A. 4.1.2 Classifying contemporary ceramic impermanence
The most common types of impermanent work considered through the research process are grouped under four headings: classic installation, dynamic installation, materially degrading installation, and performance/ event. These descriptors have been devised as part of the research
programme to fill a perceived classificatory gap in the literature. The major forms of ceramic art practice involving impermanence with which this thesis is concerned are described and illustrated from the work of contemporary makers, Chapter 10 returning to the issue of classifications of impermanence as an aspect of characterising impermanence in contemporary art practice. While ‘installation’ is often used to describe impermanent contemporary ceramic work in a gallery, it is too broad a term for the purposes of this thesis, given that impermanent work may also present itself in the
environment or as live art (e.g. Cushway’s Plate Spinner). Refinement of this term was therefore the basis for generating the descriptors in the table, as indicated below.
24
Available at http://www.saatchigallery.com/artists/jeppe_hein.htm. [Last accessed 07.04.15]
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TABLE 4.A CLASSIFICATION SYSTEM FOR IMPERMANENT CERAMIC