Wootton, Misty Winter Sunset, 2018
Wootton, Misty Winter Sunset
55 h x 30 w cm
Private Collection
photo: Sylvain Deleu
Exhibited and sold through Zueleika Gallery, 2018 from, 'The Wootton Pots,'
I made the Wootton Pots shortly after my mother died, in 2016, and I wasn't sure if this landscape, where I grew up, would be in my life much longer. It is the Glyme Valley, on the edge of the Cotswolds, close to Woodstock in Oxfordshire.
What inspired this pot and others in the collection
I made it because I loved Winter there more than any other season. I loved both the light and the dark, I still do. Frost over a number of days can build up forming a thick layer of crystals which reflects the light and colour of dawn and sunset. The frost briefly glows pink at these times. The mist rises in the valley and settles over the frozen floods producing, with its concentration of freezing vapour, a range of icing sugar colours.
I was in my mid fifties when mum died and hadn't lived in the area since I was eighteen but I was fortunate to be able to spend weeks at a time with her, in her house overlooking the valley, in the years before she died. I made the collection of pots, known as 'The Wootton Pots,' in 2017- 18 so they are derived from memory and express a combination of nostalgia, love, loss and some tenderness.
Borderline
All those words and their meanings have a 'borderline' quality in the official artworld lexicon. They are mildly indecent, sentimental almost which is certainly a derided quality. This, too, is a loss. There is a peculiarly English embarrassment about tender feelings which are acceptable only if firmly contained. Let them out and they are just a little embarrassing. What to do?
Clearly, editing out an entire range of emotion from your critical palette is absurd. Even more absurd is the frequent shoe-horning of (hashtag) 'climatechange,' 'pollution,' and 'extraction,' increasingly accompanied by a slew of decolonising porridge and mandatory queering. This is more often done by curators answering to management tick-box 'priorities' lists than it is by artists themselves but, whoever does it, it's mad because, for the most part, no one wants it, neither audience, artist or curator.
Decolonising and Justification
For some, certainly, decolonisation was and is still an authentic passion project. It has made a huge and important contribution to the way that contemporary art has developed, how it is discussed and even how it is viewed. The work of these artists is enlivening and often fierce, in a good way but it isn't for everyone. For many artists and curators it has become little more than a more like a wearisome bureaucratic exercise, a form of justification of the art and this is where it becomes unhealthy.
There is no need to justify art. Just take it, or leave it.
Landscape as Abstract Art
Although the emotional qualities I described above suggest a narrative of sorts, landscape is about as close to abstract painting as I get. It is inherently abstract. Concentrating on form in space and the way colour influences both is an abstract process. It can and often does produce a descriptive result but it does not have to.
Form and Materials
Painting and drawing on and into a clay surface has its own unique qualities which show in the range of colour and variety of marks. Drawing forms on to an object which is itself a three dimensional form in space throws up its own challenges and produces its own perspectives. These, too, are abstract processes. How this will evolve as I return to working exclusively on paper for the next year or so, I do not know but, meanwhile, this pot was made with an uncomplicated love of the forms, light, and texture of landscape and a similarly uncomplicated love of Winter, frost and mist. That is all.