Textures in Clay

Excerpts:

The Golden Bridge Pottery is the first workshop to make glazed stoneware pottery by hand in south India. Do you wish to experiment with new elements?

I built the first ‘anagama’ in Pondicherry in 2007 with Australian potter Peter Thompson. An anagama is fired with wood for three to 10 days. The objects in the anagama are not glazed. Wood ash builds up on the surfaces of the objects in the kiln and at temperatures above 1,250 degrees centigrade. The ash melts, forming a glaze. We have had workshops with Jeff Shapiro and Jack Troy, both highly respected artists from the US; both fire anagamas. This is an unusual aesthetic for the Indian art market. Historically, it is derived largely from the tea masters of Japan, with a distinct emphasis on Zen ideals. The irony perhaps is that it has been said that Bodhidharma, who founded Chan Buddhism in China, came from Kanchipuram in Tamil Nadu.

What kind of new techniques and colours are you exploring now?

Golden Bridge Pottery is not really looking at new colour, technique or even form. The pottery production has always evolved slowly. As for teaching, the major change is that I stopped teaching our seven-month course in 2013. I now bring young graduate students from the US to teach. Last year, we had Cory Brown of The Clay Art Center, New York and this year we have Sarah Wilson, a recent graduate with an MFA in ceramics from Syracuse University. Both are fine artists and enthusiastic teachers, and they bring much that is new to workshop. Tejashree Sagvedkar worked with Cory last year and has some small porcelain bowls in this exhibition.

Where do you see the status of pottery as an art form in the future? Do you think pottery can make a political statement?

Over 50 years ago, Peter Voulkos in the US made a cultural statement when he threw a porcelain plate on the wheel, dropped it on the floor and then stamped it with a deep boot print. Over the door to his office in the UC Berkley ceramic department was a sign that read, “NO CUPS!.” Thus, the art/craft debate was born, or at least reinforced. That departure towards the sculptural was much needed and pivotal in the development of ceramics as art. At this exhibition, how much of the work is pottery? Ranjita Bora’s work is a beautiful functional pottery. Is it art? Today, many, if not most of students that have come through GBP, are now making sculptures, not pottery. That trend will continue in India as elsewhere, and a few will continue to make pottery that indeed qualifies as art.

The exhibition closes today at The Attic, 36 Regal Building. Contact: 23746

(The reporter is an EXIMS student)