Tate Liverpool | Past Exhibitions | A Secret History of Clay: From Gauguin to Gormley

In 1960s America, the pot exploded. Peter Voulkos’ Untitled Vase and Untitled Dish, both 1963, show a vessel that is collapsing into an almost topographical state: here the vessel becomes a clay landscape. He and fellow West Coast artist Jun Kaneko began thinking of their work as sculpture rather than pottery, after their realisation that ‘broken forms could be as strong aesthetically as whole ones’. Kaneko went on to experiment with scale in works such as Untitled (Leaning Slab) 1987. Another West Coast artist, Ken Price, disassociated himself from the crafts community. Rejecting the principle of function, Price saw himself as a sculptor wholly occupied with form and colour.

	Pop artist Roy Lichtenstein’s Set of Dinnerware Objects 1966 uses thickly potted bland hotel china-ware – the ceramic equivalent of Andy Warhol’s Brillo boxes. Complete with comic-strip shading, they exist as three-dimensional commentaries on two-dimensional images of three-dimensional objects.
Roy Lichtenstein Set of Dinnerware Objects: Dinner Plate, Soup Plate, Soup Dish, Salad Plate, Side Plate, Saucer, Cup 1966 Tate, Presented by Galerie Ileana Sonnabend, Paris, 1967 © Estate of Roy Lichenstein/DACS, 2004. Photograph Tate, 2004

The photograph of the wall of clay that Noguchi constructed at his house in Kamakura in the early 1950s defies the small, intimate gestures normally associated with ceramics, and is testament to a more physical practice on a much larger scale. Artists such as Noguchi and Nobuo Sekine evoke a powerful sense of clay as earth, as being the great formless primal matter that allowed them a kind of expression they could not approach through other materials. Indeed, the image of ‘a returning to earth’ carries with it the feeling of having been separated, alienated or disconnected from the earth – or a land or a culture. Clay allowed for a return to self, a return to the body, a return to the earth. Kazuo Shiraga of the Gutai group explored this idea in his performance, Challenging Mud 1955, writhing around in clay until he was so exhausted that the earth had ‘won’.

Jim Melchert, Changes – Performance with Drying Slip, 1972

In Jim Melchert’s 1972 performance Changes, the artist and his companions enact a return to the earth, and the object dematerialises completely. The artist and others dunk their heads in clay slip and are filmed waiting for it to dry, in a room that is hot at one end and cold at the other. The body itself is described in terms of the vessel: ‘It encases your head so that the sounds that you hear are interior, your breathing, your heartbeat, and your nervous system. (It is surprising how vast we are inside.)’

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