'Earthscape Cosmography'
'Into the Distance', Royal Scottish Academy, Edinburgh, 2023/Invoking Absence', Hallidays Mill Gallery, Chalford, 2021
Medium: fired and glazed porcelain and earthenware, oil paint, leather, unfired clay, bioplastic
Earthscape Cosmography is an evolving collection of objects, mostly made of ceramic, suggesting activities of foraging and sheltering, hearth-making and play. The starting point for ‘Earthscape Cosmography’ was my interest in Tim Ingold’s idea of the taskscape. He talked about the landscape not as an empty place of serene aesthetic contemplation, but as the site where humans (and animals) have always carried out the tasks of living, such as hunting, foraging, cooking and making tools. He described it as, ‘woven like a tapestry from the lives of its inhabitants, the land is not so much a stage for the enactment of history, or a surface on which it is inscribed, as history congealed. … the lives of persons and the histories of their relationships can be traced in the textures of the land.’ (The Perception of the Environment: Essays on Livelihood, Dwelling and Skill, Ingold 2000: 149–50)
After reading about the idea of the taskscape, I saw some artefacts in The Corinium Museum in Cirencester, including an antler pick – a carved antler that would have been used for mining, and it felt like a readymade tool. You could imagine a neolithic person finding it on a bed of moss in the woods and it being pretty much good to go. I made my own version of the pick in porcelain, but my version has a hand-print grip impressed into it, underlining that invitation to use it as a tool.
The other objects include discs of clay that could be platters to eat off, twig-like objects and a small ceramic spinner that could be a primitive toy. These objects are almost but not quite familiar, suggesting more than one use or meaning. I think we can all enter this mindset of play and potential, like when we go for a walk and pick up sticks and unusual stones on the way, holding them in our hands and testing them as tools for supporting us or using them to draw with.
Earthscape Cosmography has been exhibited several times, and each time it gains an artefact in response to its new situation, adding to the palette of materials and the criss-crossing of timescales. It has some ‘wild card’ items that are not made by me, such as a chocolate coin, so it is not too reverential, and it is not a collection purely influenced and shaped by ancient things. For example, it has a dome-shaped ceramic object that looks like a Tunnock’s chocolate teacake, which was made when the exhibition it was shown in Edinburgh.
