Would you have the guts to pick this up?
This week: Ceramicist Louise Waller at Victoria Gallery & Museum; Liverpool's Independents Biennial; Myths & Monsters live game at Great North Museum; walk into the future at Manchester International
THERE’S a sculpture in Tate Liverpool that Louise Waller can’t stop looking at. Louise works there, so visiting it when she has a few moments spare is easy enough - but there are hundreds of works in the gallery so why keep going back to this one? What is it about this Anthony Caro’s Table Piece XXVIII - a simple cylindrical steel form with a strange hose-shaped handle that doesn’t look as if it would do the job it’s apparently designed for - that captures her curiosity over and over again?
Observe her own work currently on display at Victoria Gallery and Museum as part of Liverpool’s Independents Biennial, and it starts to make sense. Her clay forms share a certain sort of incongruity with the Caro piece that so fascinates her. Holey spheres that appear to be more absence of clay than actual clay itself are attached to cylinders resembling hollow bamboo canes or factory chimneys. Are they handles or decoration? If they weren’t imprisoned inside display cases, would you dare to try to lift one?
‘It really tests your nerve whether or not you’re able to pick them up with that,’ says Louise. ‘I like that idea, making things that have a suggestion of function but then ideally be too beautiful, and people won’t want to put twigs and things in them.’
‘It’s really ridiculous to me that you can’t sell a cup for more because there are so many processes that go into making it well-balanced and beautiful’
She is interested in - and possibly a little frustrated by - the concept of value and that functional items are often deemed of less worth.
‘People value things that are fine art or that are wall-mounted quite often more than things that are handmade or functional,’ she explains. ‘You can only really sell a handmade cup for £25 whereas you can sell a handmade sculpture that does nothing for £10,000. It’s really ridiculous to me that you can’t sell a cup for more because there are so many processes that go into making it well-balanced and beautiful. I don’t know the answer to it, it’s something that’s rolling around in my imagination.’
People fortunate enough to own one of her pots often tell Louise of the sprayed twigs or random items they have displayed inside them - and she is, she says, unenthusiastic in her response. But she does acknowledge that it’s up to their owners to decide how to display them.
‘I do enjoy other people’s interpretations,’ she says. ‘I like the idea of people putting them in their own groupings. I think they very much need to be in little gangs and that gives them a family personality. When you just see one of them on their own they might look a bit confusing.’
This exhibition came about when Louise realised it was coming up to two decades since her graduation from a degree in design at Liverpool Hope University, and that she should take a moment to take stock.
‘I needed to pause and reflect and to do something for me,’ she explains. ‘I work three days a week at the Tate [as a visitor engagement assistant and freelance artist educator] and I do workshops and overtime and projects on my days off. There have been weeks where it can get a bit much and you’re almost in a blur and I needed to just stop and look at how much my skills have come on and to properly investigate that to push my work further.’
She took out her degree sketches and coursework and stopped to consider how much her skills developed over the following 20 years, then challenged herself to push further. This is a process she is repeating with the Victoria Gallery work - taking time to sketch and consider it as she continues to evolve her style. Her more recent work is even more fragile - with so many holes that it’s ‘almost like a little lacy ball’. She is ‘kind of amazed that it’s survived’.
Louise, who creates her pieces at Baltic Clay in Bramley Moore Dock, didn’t intend to become a ceramics artist. She studied pottery as part of a GNVQ in art and design at Sheffield College but ‘didn’t overly love it’. She’d hoped to specialise in furniture on her design degree course but the wood dust in the workshop triggered her allergies. That left sewing and ceramics.
‘Ceramics almost came about because I was better at that than sewing but when I graduated I missed it so much, I missed touching clay and I was desperate to go back to it,’ she says.
‘You always start with something big and ugly and chunky’
‘You can do so much with it and, when you get to a certain level of skill, you understand when the clay is the right dryness to be able to do different things to it, to manipulate it in certain ways. As that clicks there’s kind of no end to what you can do.
‘You always start with something big and ugly and chunky, and it always goes through a really awkward stage. Then you can, once it dries, attack it with a kidney or some wire wool and make it really beautiful.’
Louise Waller - 20 Years of Clay is at the Victoria Gallery & Museum, Liverpool, until December 31. More details here. She is also showing her work as a member of Tate Staff Artists in the group exhibition Evocation, which is being held at Elevator Studios from August 17 and Avenue HQ from August 24. Further details here.
During August, Louise is running clay moneybox workshops for ages 7+ at Shakespeare North Playhouse in Prescot. They are priced £15 and you keep your creation. Book here.
More to discover at the Independents Biennial 2023
This year’s event is unfunded so, rather than the Independents Biennial commissioning work, it is providing a spotlight for existing exhibitions and art events taking place in Merseyside over the summer. These include:
Liverpool City of Music - The Buskers: John Macdonald’s photographs of the people who entertain us as we shop, meet friends or walk to work are on display at Invisible Wind Factory, Factory Kitchen, until September 30. It’s open Tuesday to Friday, 1-3pm.
Between Two Rivers: Seven Wirral-based artists celebrate their love of the peninsula at the Lake Gallery in West Kirby until July 22.
Sorry, Did You Miss Me?: Stephanie Trujillo explores the feeling of ‘rest, joy and relief’ after coming through a difficult period in her work and personal life. Her poetry, collages, photos and paintings are at the Royal Standard from Sunday, July 16 to Wednesday, July 19.
Creatures of the Psyche: Anna Ketskemety, Vicki Lucas le Bon, Ben Lloyd, Danny May and Chiz Turnross are reuniting at Bridewell Studios and Gallery 26 years after they met as art students. They will ‘delve into imagined worlds with invisible undercurrents, dark reflections and alluring light’ from August 17.
Beyond the Fell Wall: Artists who rediscovered walking and a new exploration of nature during lockdown have taken inspiration from Richard Skelton’ ‘poetic enquiry into the inanimate life of a landscape’ (which I have now ordered from my local bookshop after reading the description on publisher Little Toller’s website). Their work will be at Kent Street Studios, in Oxton Village, on the weekend of September 2-3.
This week we’re also buzzing about…
Myth Quest - Monsters and Mortals: Part immersive story, part live-action game, visitors to The Great North Museum: Hancock are invited to take the part of an adventurer, exploring myths and monsters throughout the museum to complete their quests. It’s free to take part. Find out more in the video above or by clicking here.
Bus Regulation - The Musical: Staged in collaboration with Better Buses for Merseyside, local performers on roller skates play the 'buses' to tell the history of public transport provision on Merseyside from the post-war period up to the present day, and going into the future. One of Glasgow-based artist Ellie Harrison's trilogy of public transport roller-skating musicals (there’s also one set in Greater Manchester), it is being performed at the Black-E on Saturday July 15, at 2pm and 3:30pm to raise awareness of the current public consultation on bus franchising. Free tickets available here.
We Cut Through Dust: This collaboration between Blast Theory and Manchester Street Poem is described as ‘a walk into the future, guided by a series of phone calls’. They’re not giving much away, except that it takes an hour and is set in the near future ‘somewhere between the real and the fantastical’. If you’re as intrigued as I am, there are still plenty of slots to book on to between now and July 16. Find out more about that here and the full Manchester International programme here.
Thank you for reading. I’m planning to pack next week’s Stored Honey with fun and interesting ways to spend the rest of the summer - not exclusively aimed at families but with plenty of kid-friendly things in the mix - so if there’s something you’re looking forward to please let me know and I’ll do my best to include it. I’m available on Twitter, in the comments or you can drop me a line at tostoredhoney@gmail.com.
Hope you all have a great week,
Laura