13 Jan 2012

An English Pastorale

Crockery
The collection of creamware and enamelware, of cups, mugs, jugs and other artefacts that might be colloquially identified as pottery, form the substance of Henry Willett's bequest on which the Brighton Museum & Gallery built its initial collection. For Willett, and for subsequent curators, these items possessed an appeal that exceeded any purely formal, aesthetic properties. In a prototype of today's anthropologists concerns with material culture, for Willett these little things communicated something of the lived life of their owners and makers.

For the hotspot called "An English Pastorale", I wanted to literalise these objects' relation to the hedged lanes, cobbled streets, creaking wharfs, rustling copses and gentle valleys of their country of origin. I wanted to create a sly counterpoint to the more anodyne painterly depiction of the English landscape, something I had attempted to do before, both in sound and in video. But I also wanted to reach another hand out to feel, so to speak, the tactile qualities of these glazed objects, their thickness and thinness, their robustness of fragility.

Brushes_hammers
Assembling a collection of ceramic objects from the kitchen cupboard and a selection of brushes and hammers from other points in the house, I set about trying to release their vibrations, recording the results on a Schaller guitar pick up mic. I then processed the recordings. accentuate the

Guitar