This title has been spinning round my head a lot recently, as ostensibly I could. be classed as a craftsman, due to the nature of my art practice whether it is making ceramics, carving woodblocks for printing or even just. carving a piece of wood these generally classed as craft work, the thing is I have always class. myself as an artist using craft means to get my message across.
As I said in an. earlier post I’ve started reading the documents of contemporary art books published published by the Whitechapel Gallery, the one I have found recently interesting is the book on craft like the entry on Lucio Fontana and his writing on his ceramics from 1939 when he was working at the Sevres factory.
He starts with “I am a sculptor, not a ceramicist. I have never turned the plate on a wheel nor painted a vase. I detest lacy designs and dainty nuances.” He continues with ” I load the mystification of technique. The amazing technical achievement of Serves or Copenhagen satisfies the taste. of the upper classes and collectors they are thrilled by the fragility and delicacy of where. I am looking for something different.”
“During the time I spent in the workshop at Serve’s I studied form and the expression of form. I continued to model as I have in my studio, figures and metamorphoses that weighed pounds and pounds. I painted them in vibrant colours. The forms I made, right from the beginning, have never been disassociated from my colour You. My sculpture has always been polychrome. I painted on plaster and on terracotta.
” it. was not until 1936, in the Mazzotti factory in Albisola, but I. began my real work in this field, producing about 50 pieces: seaweed, butterflies, flowers, crocodiles, lobsters- are complete petrified aquarium in glowing colours. The material attracted me, I could shape a submarine landscape, a statue or a tangle of hair and crisp short pigment onto it which the heat of the kiln would then amalgamate. The kiln was a kind of intermediary: it made form and colour permanent”
“The critic called critics called these ceramics. I called them sculpture.”
Okay this is a very heavily edited text but what we can. make from this is that Lucio was standing up and saying that his work was not ceramics it was sculpture, and that’s where the question comes, at what point does a craft piece become a piece of art or gets classed as a sculptural piece of art?
I also like the way that he talks about working with the clay, I find working with clay is very much like drawing in 3D and when I work with it I’m sketching up new ideas, one piece leads to the next, my hands form and sculpt the clay and slowly it morphs from a a lump of clay in to a head or a mask or something els all together. The same way of working applies to my other sculptures each piece informs the next piece which can be totally exciting as everything comes together in a flash of inspiration or by complete and total chance.
The Art and musings of Jeffrey Knopf 