Exhibition review in The Journal of Modern Craft

Review of extensive exhibition of contemporary French ceramic art entitled “Circuit Céramique aux Arts Décoratifs: La Scène Française Contemporaine” held at Musée des Arts Décoratifs, Paris, in 2010, on the occasion of the 44th assembly of the International Academy of Ceramics

Seeing Things: Collected Writing on Art, Craft and Design

This book gathers together a selection of Britton’s writings, including new, previously unpublished pieces, in an investigation of what the crafts have meant through the last three decades. Britton has mainly published in the ephemeral forms of exhibition catalogues and magazines. Her intention with Seeing Things was to assemble not simply an essay anthology, but rather an historical narrative of the development and the new conceptions of craft, as revealed in the threads of one person’s commissioned output throughout the period of Postmodernism. The particular slant of insider/outsider writing was key to the project for Britton as practitioner and critic. Despite her roots in ceramic practice, much of her writing has been about other disciplines. Britton’s close relationship with two leading galleries in London (Contemporary Applied Arts, 1984–95, and Barrett Marsden/Marsden Woo Gallery, 1998–present), led to her contributing short introductions to new work by a wide range of exhibitors. Britton argues that craft is not a discrete category with its own rules, but an ingredient across the spectrum of art and design, making it more dynamic, exciting and complex than is often assumed. The overlaps and ambivalent borderlines, especially in the rapid evolution of the 1980s, broke with the past and brought new ideas to light. Her situation as a maker, teacher and curator, and the complexity of changing cultural definitions in the past 30 years have been a continuous stimulus to writing and making. The innovation of the book comes from combining initial response and retrospective reflection. Using the material written when the work was just made, and evaluating the perceptions of that time through new writing that introduces, and comments on, the text selections made, Britton aims for a particular combination of immediacy and distance, the coal-face and the bird’s eye view

Standing and Running

This exhibition at Marsden Woo Gallery, London (2012) consisted of 12 hand-built ceramic works presented on three large plinths. Emphasis was on the application of colour through pouring slip, and then glaze, across the pots’ surfaces. This exploitation of superimposed fluid shapes/trails led to greater compositional risk and improvisation. Extending Britton’s concern with aspects of the ‘container’ and its representation through the broad history and culture of ceramics, this group of works explored the idea of flow and liquidity through form and surface. The new pots were larger than previous works; Float was Britton’s largest horizontal form made to date. Initially, a number of red clay bodies were tested for their fit with slips and glazes within the normal firings of Britton’s buff clay pieces. A series of vertical jars were constructed, some in buff clay and some in red. Britton’s return to red clay followed a residency at the Shigaraki Ceramic Cultural Park, Japan (2010). These upright forms were rectangular or oval in cross-section, or a combination of both, and the pieces were animated by cylindrical ‘pipes’ that alluded to conduits, ornaments, limbs, spouts, handles. The second series were plate-like forms on flared bases, likewise in both buff and red clay. The red and buff versions echoed each other in quasi 'pairs', though each was a discrete object. The individual title of each pot made reference to water, as did the exhibition title. A critical essay by Brigit Connolly was available in the gallery. The exhibition was previewed in Crafts Magazine and reviewed in Ceramic Review and the Australian magazine Ceramics Art and Perception. The pot Watershed was later shown in the exhibition ‘The Perfect Place to Grow: 175 Years of the Royal College of Art’ (London, 2012-13); Outpour is now in the ceramic collection of the V&A Museum

Unforeseen Events

Britton collaborated with Norwegian artist Marit Tingleff in this duo, to extend the dialogue between their ceramic works, continuing an international rapport. In 2007 Tingleff and Britton were part of a much larger exhibition END, which had ben coordinated over some years between 7 British and Scandinavian artists. It was shown first in Copenhagen at the Kunstindustrimuseet and then at Bomuldsfabriken Kunsthall, Arendal,Norway. For Unforeseen Events, working out of sight of each other’s researches (hence the title) both were engaged with material risks in making fresh discoveries in form and surface, and an investigation of the breadth of expression achievable with a limited palette of pigment and glaze. Allusions to tableware were common to both, beyond the context of function. Tingleff’s six huge rectangular plates, e.g.170 x 92 cm, painted with slips and glaze, were wall mounted on shelves. Britton’s fifteen pieces were smaller in scale and greater in formal variety, occupying two expansive tables/plinths .The significance and innovation of this series of pots in the commitment she shows to stretching the idea of the container, was rooted in the following: Ongoing glaze experiments, fluidity, transparency, altering slips underneath. Green and yellow key colours, also a new manganese brown used with yellow, and kinds of white. New variations of formal types: jug, jar,plate, also a channeling double pot form, changed by a cone-section base. Jugs flaring and tapering, forms made by a newly defined curving slab process Plates as platforms, straight-sided ovals, deep hollows; oblong plates with oval centre fields, and exaggerated relief ornaments eg Squirl Scaling up as skill grows with new means of glazing initiated in 2007. A gallery essay by Edmund de Waal was also available online. Reviewed in Ceramic Review, issue 241,Jan/Feb 2010, later published in Norwegian. Pieces from both Britton and Tingleff from Unforeseen Events were illustrated in De Waal’s The Pot Book, Phaidon , 2011

Dead ends and possibilities: potters - the work of Martin Lungley and Ashley Howard prompts Alison Britton to reconsider the role of the wheel in contemporary studio pottery

Article published in Ceramic Review 210 November/December 2004 p. 24-25 This article is an edited extract from the fully illustrated catalogue 'Full Circle' which was produced to accompany the touring exhibition of the same name during 2005

The Sumptuous Appeal of the Tactile

Catalogue essay , one of three, in the catalogue 'Angus Suttie' for a retrospective exhibition at Ruthin Crafts Centre, The Centre for the Applied Arts, Ruthin, Denbighshire. The exhibitiom ran from April 14 - July 15 2018. It transferred to the Crafts Study Centre, UCA, Farnham. The exhibition was influenced by Suttie's personal collection and significant archive, and was co curated by Jeffrey Weeks, Suttie collection trustee, and Gregory Parsons,Ruthin curator. Both RCC and CSC share the commitment to presenting works of the recent past to counterpoint their contemporary programmes

Betty Woodman

A review in The Burlington Magazine, May 2016, of the first substantial UK exhibition of the work of the eminent American ceramic artist Betty Woodman, at The Institute of Contemporary Arts in London. The exhibition, entitled 'Betty Woodman: Theatre of the Domestic', ran at ICA February 3 - April 10 2016. It had been shown first at Museo Marini, Florence, Italy, Sep 20 - Nov 21, 2017

Selected ceramic works for the exhibition Things of Beauty Growing : British Studio Pottery

Four ceramic works were chosen for the exhibitions. In Yale Center for British Art Leaning Blue and White Pot (1987), Pale Double Pot (1995) and Outpour (2012) were exhibited. In Fitzwilliam Museum Pale Double Pot (1995) was replaced by Double Green Pot (1995) as these pieces were from private collections in USA and UK respectively. In selecting works of mine from the 1980s, 1990s and 2012 the curators were illustrating the development of contemporary practice in the postmodern period. The first two were shown in the section of the exhibition called 'Vessel' and the most recent piece was shown in the section called 'Monument'. All ceramic works are hand built, high fired earthenware with painted and poured slips and glazes

Fieldwork

Alison Britton's first solo exhibition in Norway. It consisted of 10 new ceramic works and 2 pieces made in 2015 - 2016. This group of works included 4 new ceramic plate forms that were hung on the wall. All the works were hand built, high fired earthenware painted with slips and underglaze pigment, completed with poured and painted glazes. The exhibition was opened by the UK Ambassador in Oslo Sarah Gillet

Life and Still Life

In ‘Life and Still Life’, Britton showed a series of six new works in red clay alongside six earlier pieces. Surrounding these pots with 100 collected objects made by others, Britton presented her work in a conceptual framework: an innovative correspondence, slight or blatant, between the pots and the collection. Britton’s work was exhibited at the Crafts Study Centre (CSC) on low plinths, and the objects, photographs and drawings shown behind glass and on walls. Originality was evident in developing making processes and extending scale and palette; the play of slip and glaze-pouring across the forms was bolder than in previous work. Repetitive slip-pouring is a traditional technique on batches of small functional pots, but Britton used it unconventionally and at some risk on large clay objects of irregular form. Links between writing and making provide Britton with a rigorous to-and-fro methodology. An essay on historic Devonshire slipware (2010) was subliminal in her use of red clay. Curating ‘Three by One’ (2009) seeded the idea of exposing her collected objects with her own work. Groups of crockery and cutlery, among many single objects, enacted a visual history and language. Connections were further explored in a catalogue containing new photography and two essays, one by Britton (‘Things and work’, pp.15–29). Creating the catalogue developed Britton’s methodology; her essay questioned why she has an attachment to ordinary function without adopting it in her practice. The friction of two photographers making two kinds of photography of the same objects was key; informal and domestic in the catalogue, and public in recording the deliberate arrangement of the exhibition. 1,825 people saw the exhibition, which was reviewed in Ceramic Review (2013). Britton also gave a public talk about the show at the CSC in November 2012