I love a pot. Ceramics, for me, have always held a strange allure, their textures and alchemical colours highly covetable and dangerously tactile. Imagine my delight then at the news of the Hayward Gallery’s latest exhibition, Strange Clay, exploring the use of the medium by contemporary artists and in which pots are very much just the start.
In fact only a couple of the 23 international, multi-generational artists in this show make anything like a traditional pot; Grayson Perry, of course, who uses the familiar form as a vehicle for witty social commentary, and the peerless Magdalene Odundo, whose ethereally smooth vessels evoke the human body with their bulbous lines, apertures and nodules forming maws and navels.
And there’s the inevitable installation of tiny white vases by Edmund de Waal, here displayed in perspex cabinets suspended from the ceiling, with a set of seating cushions from which to contemplate their serenity. I’ve never fully got De Waal and here, to me it feels sparse, rather than spare.
Most of the work on display would be more accurately described as sculpture, with the unpredictability inherent in the material adding an extra layer of meaning, along with a crust of cultural preconception about ceramics thicker than any glaze.
Much of it is underscored by humour. Jonathan Baldock’s vast totems exploring myth and folklore are adorned with casts of his own ears or hands, pointing and fist-bumping, and emoticons scattered about like ritual hieroglyphs. Emma Hart’s absurdist clay car windshields depict delightful stylised narratives that reward long-looking. Klara Kristalova’s thoroughly weird installation of 18 stoneware figures (plants with eyes, fairies with mushrooms for mouths) amid dried vegetation somehow gets away with its mad whimsy by also being deeply and enjoyably creepy.
Speaking of creepy, fast-rising star Lindsey Mendick has been given a room of her own for a new installation, Till Death Do Us Part, in which the home is a battleground, infested with warring ceramic vermin: slugs and cockroaches, mice, moths and in the bathroom, something with tentacles I really don’t want to think about. She presents the home as a microcosm; a potential hell as easily as it can be a haven.
Weird, though, is the word that kept cropping up. Takuro Kuwata’s bizarre blobs are apparently radical reinterpretations of Japanese tea bowls - you’d never guess, but his experimental glazing results in some extraordinary stuff - one appears to be oozing chocolate brownie, another blue cake frosting. My favourite piece was David Zink Yi’s Untitled (Architeuthis), a dead giant squid, exquisitely rendered in gleaming ceramic, its slimy glazes asking: is this ink or oil? Is that pollution or a natural secretion? If I get close to it, will it grab my ankle? Brrrrr.
Others are more austere, though hardly less beautiful. Lubna Chowdhary’s distinctive wall panels contrast the lush with the minimal, the industrial with the handmade, while Shahpour Pouyan’s elegant collection of historic rooftops, rendered at small scale and displayed like so many soup tureens, explore complex questions of cultural difference and similarity. Liu Jianhua’s Regular/Fragile installation of white ceramic toys, flasks, water pistols, slippers, handbags and other detritus of life is magical at first, then chilling. Look out for the single skull. It’s a testament to this extraordinary, humble material, that it can say so much, so quietly.
