'Black has almost inescapable traditional symbolism as the colour of darkness, negative forces and unhappy events. It stands for death , ignorance , despair, sorrow, and evil.
In superstition black is synonymous with disaster, black cats black days. As the colour of mourning it dramatizes loss and absence. '
The complete dictionary of symbols in myth, art and literature. Editor Jack Tresidder
It's interesting how colours are attached to symbolic references or meanings.
I'm not incorporating any conventional associations in my approach to the colour black.
I'm more interested in how light and dark visually work together. The strength and intensity black has particularly on a large scale, spanning spaces.
How a dark environment can be transformed when floodlit with sunlight. I'm aware that light also has strong symbolic connections but that is another conversation .........
Blackness...... darkness....... what do we see in darkness? what do we think we may have seen ? How does a lack of light make us feel?
I have this fascination with the colour black at the moment, well
I say at the moment. It really began at the beginning of my MA when I discovered this incredible black clay and started working on small models I have a few examples of these pieces past and present, including a few more images I have been collecting along the way.
Here are a few images I took of Peter Zumthor's Serpentine Pavilion 2011. The saturation of colour was quite intense considering how bright it was outside that day. That's what I adore about these relatively small spaces. Once inside you are fully immersed into these experiential environments. What ever you experience within the confines of these small spaces you cannot fail to feel something. With the turn of each corner came this unusual feeling that the walls were closing in on you in much the same way certain Richard Serra's pieces do but that's normally the angles at which the walls are standing. This was very much about the quality of light within a narrow passageway.
This was the first experimentation with black clay during my early findings and explorations at the Victoria and Albert museum residency. At this point I was interested in light and dark contrasts and marks.
Here I have three different clays that were watered down to a slip consistency and poured onto a plaster bat in thin layers building up the surface over time. It was so fragile but i was interested in canvas looking sheets with the idea to have them suspended on a huge scale.
Cape Cornwall where natural black clay can be dug from the ground although once fired it's slightly purple in tone.
It's unusual to have an explosion in the kiln I think I've only had it happen twice in my 15years of making. However about three weeks ago I had quite a spectacular mess awaiting me when I opened the kiln. I had a large rectangular carved piece. It was really heavy and thick, although I had been drying it over three to four weeks and fired so slowly it must have still been a little damp in the middle which was impossible to tell given the size of the piece. Here are the pieces left and currently sitting in my studio which triggered an idea for a possible project Sasha and myself are currently working on.
Unfired black clay in this state it looks very much like a darker terracotta
This is the transformation after firing i took this up to 1260 oC and have returned to the black and white contrast. Until I go ahead and design a full scale black piece of work I think I will continue to this slight obsession with the drama these two opposing materials create together.
This was some of the charcoal Anne and I used for the Bond Street window display back in May. We selected it as it came from English Coppice woods the pieces were still intact as entire branches the bark in some cases were also still attached but had turned this incredible silver shade.
Julian Stair's new works being shown at the British Ceramics Biennial in Spode. I had to include these for several reasons containment and scale although the work is completely different and more traditional in form, in so many ways I felt that the ideas based around encasement and being contained was also close to some of my own thinking.
