Gone fishing

I've been getting interested in the work of Finnish artist Caroline Slotte, who aims to reveal 'the poetry of everyday objects' by reworking found objects, mainly second hand ceramic items. In the examples below, she has cut into and sanded down the dream-like ideal landscapes to be found on discarded plates.  Writing on the V&A blog, Glenn Adamson describes her work as evoking 'the sense of loss and memory that old china often carries in our lives, as it sits silent and half-forgotten in the cupboard.' The museum has an example of her Rose Border Multiple series, in which a set of plates has been cut through and stacked to evoke the 'historical recession of time'.  Looking into these tiny stage sets, like paper theatres, an awareness of their history as mass-produced objects gives way to early childhood memories in which blue and white china plates were an exotic and unfathomable feature of the dining room, with figures that seemed capable of coming to life and landscapes that might allow themselves to be entered into.

Caroline Slotte, Rose Border Multiple, Double Blue II,

reworked second hand object, 2007 

Source: Caroline Slotte, used with permission

Other Caroline Slotte pieces work through a process of erasure, leaving only boats in the Gone Fishing series and cloud patterns in Under Blue Skies.  The former are particularly poignant, where seemingly everything has been forgotten but the presense of a fishing boat. They seem to have sailed into the kind of misty emptiness we associate with Chinese landscape painting, a Taoist void.  In the example below, the tiny vessel appears to be heading past a stain on the plate resembling a low sun seen through fog. (Writing this reminds me that in the previous post here I referred to Leonardo's comment that the artist could turn stains into imaginary landscapes...)  But in Gone Fishing, the landscape, which was nothing more than in fantasy in the first place, has disappeared, and any memories of the plate itself and the story of how it sustained that crack are unrecoverable.

Caroline Slotte, Gone Fishing,

reworked second hand object, 2007 

Source: Caroline Slotte, used with permission

Caroline Slotte is one of several contemporay ceramic artists re-working found objects.  Another is Paul Scott who (like Slotte) features in  Edmund De Waal's The Pot Book, with a piece called Cumbrian Blue(s) Trees in a Fenced Garden (made in collaboration with Ann Linnemann).  The trees are on two porcelain cups and look as if they could come from a Willow pattern landscape but for the small silhouette of an aeroplane above.  The fenced garden is a tray printed with a rolling landscape but surrounded by the kind of railings you would expect to find in a municipal park.  This kind of anti-pastoral pastiche has been used in recent years by designers in various media: the toile wallpaper patterns, for example, of Timorous Beasties and Jessica Smith.  Paul Scott's other designs include Foot and Mouth, Dounreay and Three Gorges After the Dam - a theme addressed by other artists I've mentioned here, in which a Spode bone china Willow pattern plate is mostly submerged beneath the waves.  Pieces like these may provoke a reaction in the spirit of eighteenth century satire, but they have little of the haunting quality to be found in Slotte's reworked objects.  As Edmund De Waal says, her work is engaged in uncovering a mystery, whilst simultaneously contructing a new one.