My blog version of the article I wrote for NCECA 2014 Journal as Demonstrating Artist
Michelle Erickson
My career-long fascination
with ceramic history during the period of Western exploration, expansion, and
dominion began with exposure to archeological ceramics in the “colonial
triangle” of Virginia. Fragments of British, European, Asian, and Native
American pottery unearthed in early colonial excavations embody a remarkable
global convergence of cultures in clay.
My now 25 years in the rediscovery of lost ceramic techniques of this
era has come to define my work as a contemporary artist.
My work has been
cleverly and aptly described from time to time by critical genius. Garth Clark
once dubbed me a “Post Modern Chameleon.” (Fig.1)
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Liberty private collection
Photo Gavin Ashworth NY |
The then prince of craft Glenn Adamson prior to his recent coronation at the Museum of Arts and Design encapsulated the nature of my practice as both a “grim fascination” like “a driver slowing down beside an accident” and a ‘Magpie flitting through ceramic history.’ (Fig.2)
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Pagoda Tulipiere's Museum of Art and Design NY
Photo Gavin Ashworth NY |
Ceramics in America editor Robert
Hunter poetically captured the spiritual side of creation describing my
trancelike modeling of clay forms as “channeling an ancient votive maker
worrying the clay between her fingers.”
(Fig.3)
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| Temptation Posset Private Collection |
And in his 2011
The Pot Book Edmund de Waal included my
Pectin Shell Teapot in
his top 300 worlds pots.
Definitely flattering but it’s his words that I want on my tombstone which
truly animate the calamity of making art.
In describing my work he begins:
“
A
cobbled-together cartoon teapot has the feel of an object that cannot wait to
be made. There is an urgency about this situation: a response is required,
right now.” (Fig. 4)
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Pectin Shell Teapot 2005
Photo Gavin Ashworth NY |
Edmund’s visceral description could perhaps only come from a
fellow ‘maker’. As such he could see the impractical, unpredictable, and impossible
constructs of my work, which is often full of arcane unknowns and clumsy
imperfections, but in the end they have to work. I want to have a self-possessed understanding of the ceramic objects
that inspire me. Although mimickery, appropriation, and even the direct use of
historical artifacts and their refuse can be an extraordinarily effective means
of reference, my art is actually about the connection gained through the
intimate act of recreation.
During
my tenure at the V&A I created three films in collaboration with the V&A
and The Chipstone Foundation that document the process of recreating two icons
from British ceramic history: one illustrating the arcane forming, decoration
and social function of an 18th-century English delft puzzle jug and the
second revealing the enigmatic techniques and elite production of a 1750’s Staffordshire
pectin shell agate teapot. (Fig. 5)
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| Making an Agate Teapot Video Still Juriaan Booij |
The third
video documents my working studio and curated exhibition case in the V&A’s
ceramics galleries that included 13
th century London jug, indigenous
clays foraged from East London construction sites and sprig molded patterns
taken off Olympic trainers donated by
Nike 2012 Olympic Track
and Field Innovation to make dragons, sauce boats and other
stuff . (Fig. 6)
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My V&A Residency Cases
Photo Robert Hunter |
The videos can be seen on the V&A Channel (QR code) or
just by using google. The videographer Juriaan Booij is extraordinary as he collapses
a decade of work into 5 minutes. (Fig. 7)
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In my V&A residency studio with videographer Juriaan Booij filming Making an English Delft Puzzle Jug
Photo Robert Hunter |
This blog ME@V&A is a resource that further describes and illustrates my
research and experimentation while there and since.
Beginning in 2001 my experimental archeology became the subject of an
ongoing collaboration with the debut of the annual journal Ceramics In America now in it’s fourteenth year. The journal published
by the Chipstone Foundation has both incorporated and initiated projects
resulting in several comprehensive articles on my process of reverse engineering
historical ceramic technologies. To date they include English slipware
techniques, English agateware, recreating an
18th-century American porcelain picklestand from the Philadelphia China
Manufactory of Bonnin and Morris. In addition, I
worked in collaboration with ceramic historians and curators to reproduce a North
Carolina Moravian figural flask, a ring bottle, and several slipware objects. (Fig.8)
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| 2nd Amendment Squirrel courtesy of Ceramics in America 2009 |
In 2008 my commissioned artwork appeared on the cover of Ceramics in America and featured in the
article Fit For A Queen written by
Ivor Noel Hume OBE who tells the story of my design and creation of the
official gift given to Queen Elizabeth II during her historic visit to Virginia
in 2007 commemorating the 400th anniversary of founding of Jamestown.
(Fig 9)
 |
Terra Nova presented to Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth ll as the official Gift from the Commonwealth of Virginia
During The Queen's historic visit to commemorate the 400th anniversary of the first English settlement at Jamestown in 1607. Cover Article by Ivor Noel Hume OBE Ceramics In America 2008
Queen's Collection
Photo Gavin Ashworth NY |
My work with Ceramics in America has
given me access that includes the amazing photography of
Gavin Ashworth, to an extraordinary
breadth of context and scholarship on many previously unpublished archeological
and antique ceramic collections.
These lengthy full color illustrated articles have been a mutually beneficial
experience tailor made for publishing this aspect of my practice. Equally
important, however, is the significant role this historically based perspective
on the American ceramic psyche plays in the development of my art. Whether
using the precedent of anti-slavery
ceramics for the basis for my series on 21st-century child
soldiering, (Fig.10)
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Front and Centerpiece collection of the Chipstone Foundation
Photo Gavin Ashworth NY |
or exploring the fascination in the 18th
century with the discovery of fossils to address our own predicament with
fossil fuels. (Fig.11)
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Fossil Teapot collection of the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts
21st Century Galleries
Photo Gavin Ashworth NY |
The substance of our shared past is a tightrope I walk between the constraints of physical recreation and
the liberation that exists within those boundaries, a balance between force and direction. No matter
how many ceramic genres and techniques I have explored I am always compelled by
the material of clay, from it’s ancient geological origin to it’s modern space
age use. Its history is the history of us.
21st century material culture is inundated with the
technological phenomenon of seemingly instantaneous proliferation in art and
design yet it reminds me of the invention of fast food- it seemed so great at
the time. Now more than ever the art of the hand is increasingly significant in
the context of virtual experience and continues to be irreplaceable even in the
production of our most sophisticated technology. Clearly evidenced in recent
headlines like “300,000 Foxconn workers produce 500,000 iphone 5S units every
day”[viii]
Has Technology advanced art? I like to look at our most sophisticated
advancements- the future- as arcane methods of the past and in that future the
unconscious pursuit of technology for it’s own sake is force without direction an ambition
that has the dubious distinction of being the greatest thing since splitting
the atom. (Fig.12)
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Demon and Deity-pot collection of Arkansas Art Center
Photo Gavin Ashworth NY |
I suggest that it’s when
art advances technology that humanity is universally advanced and somehow clay
is always at the center. Grandiose words from “Hampton potter Michelle
Erickson”.
1) Garth Clark Blue +
White = Radical Catalogue essay, Garth Clark Gallery NY 2002
2) Glenn Adamson Re-enter
The Dragon: the Post Modernism Of Chinese Ceramics, Transfer: The Influence of China on
World Ceramics. Colloquies on Art & Archaeology in Asia No. 24 Cover
Article, Percival David Foundation of Chinese Art page 158
3) Robert Hunter Specializing
in the Diverse: Kerameiki Techni Aug 2004, page 43-47
4) Edmund de Waal The
Pot Book, Phaidon Press Oct 10 2011 page
5) 2007? Daily Press whatever article Mark St John Erickson
Michelle Erickson has a B.F.A. from The College of
William and Mary. Her contemporary ceramics in museums collections include The
Chipstone Foundation, The Museum of Art and Design, The Long Beach Museum of
Art The New-York Historical Society,The Peobody Essex, Yale University Gallery,
The Carnegie Museum, The Mint Museums, Seattle Art Museum, Virginia Museum of
Fine Arts, Cincinnati Art Museum, Arkansas Art Center, The Potteries Museum
Stoke on Trent, UK and the Victoria and Albert Museum London. Her work has been
featured in numerous national and international publications. Erickson is
renowned for her research into 17
th- and 18
th-century
ceramic techniques published extensively in Ceramics in America and has
lectured and demonstrated her work widely for scholarly groups and institutions.
She has designed and produced ceramics for major motion pictures and HBO series
John Adams. As Artist in Residence at London’s Victoria and Albert Museum in
2012 Erickson created three videos now on the V&A Channel the films were
shown at Ceramic Arts London 2013 and the International Ceramics Festival UK.
She received a Virginia Museum of Fine Arts 2013-14 fellowship.
Michelle was guest artist at the
North Devon Festival of Pottery, funded by the British Arts Council Sept 2013
Demonstrating Artist NCECA 2014, and Guest Artist at The Metropolitan Museum of Art for their
Friday Focus An Artist's Perspective April 25
th 2014.
Erickson's recent exhibitions include her solo show
Potter's Field was at the
Clay Art Center NY April 2014. The NCECA Invitational Exhibition at Milwaukee Art Museum
Flow Feb - March 2014.
Enough Violence SCC 2013-14 and Traveling exhibition
Inciteful Clay
