Conscious Clay: Emilie Taylor in Conversation with Dr Oliver Kent
Exploring ceramics, gender, class, and rave culture in British pottery
From psychology to female Morris dancers, Dr. Oliver Kent and an audience talk to Emilie Taylor to discuss the inspiration behind the amazing ceramic art accomplished by both herself and Sam Haile. While Taylor and Haile share similarities in their ceramic work, looking at the influence of gender and class through a political lens, Taylor emphasises her reimagination of women as empowered and free, harking to 1960s British rave culture. This interview celebrated the ‘Conscious Clay’ exhibition looking at how these pots successfully illustrate the complexities of the human experience.
Dr. Oliver Kent (OK): Introduction
I'm Ollie Kent. I taught at the art school for a long time, ran the applied arts course degree there. But my background, I did a ceramics degree, I've worked in archaeology and latterly my postgrad studies were in a history of ceramics and then crossing over between art history and archaeology, studying 17th century pottery. But ceramics history, design history is my kind of core thing. I do make pots, I make teapots, I have an obsession with teapots and their position in society. In being involved with the trust here, I took a considerable interest in pulling out various core themes amongst Ken's collection and trying to do more research around them. And there are a number of threads, particular threads, dense points, if you like, in the collection, which one might pick up on. But the Marianne de Trey, Sam Haile thing is an important one of those. Ken, I don't know when he first met Marianne, but luckily he was a trustee of the Dartington Trust and Dartington Craft Centre. Her studio was originally set up by Bernard Leach and then handed over to Sam and Marianne in 1947. And she worked there right through until around about the age of 100, before the family finally prised her out and said you cannot be in this wooden hut, which he'd set fire to at least once in the middle of Dartington, on his own at night when the place was sort of shut down. But she and Ken were very close friends. The collection has a lot of her work, but also Ken took a considerable interest in Sam, who died in 1948.
Emilie Taylor (ET): Artist Statement
My name's Emilie. I make pots. They are always slip on stoneware ceramic and they tell stories often about cities and urban environments today. Stories that might be hidden or not heard, not the kind of the popular narratives that are held in our collections. I'm lucky that some of my pots have then been purchased by collections. So those people's stories then live on through the collections and become part of our history. It was lovely to be asked to come and work with Stradling. It's been amazing to find out more about Stradling and all the incredible pottery that they have here. I'm based up in Sheffield, Yorkshire, so a bit away from here. My work's made maybe a bit like how you did at school when you roll out sausages of clay and you build slowly. And when I'm building the pots, I'm sort of thinking and piecing together the stories. Often I'll start to take pictures of people I know, and places I'm familiar with that represent the narrative that's going to be in the pots. The materials are really important to me, and I suppose I'm using the mud of the land in the clay, and then using iron often to stain the clay. In this case I've used a much darker clay body that is iron rich, and that iron connects to industry. So being from the north of England, industry is something that is part of my heritage. So the iron industry and post-industrial cities and what has happened to our cities after industry is often part of the story. And then gold celebrates the human resilience or transcendence or moments of spirituality coming together often within quite a cold landscape. So that's what I make and how I make it. I also worked with Stoke on Trent. I was commissioned to be the artist that responded to the people and places of Stoke for their last Ceramic Biennial. I explored the post-industrial spaces, the potteries that were no longer potteries, and the rise of Acid House culture in the early 90s. In Sheffield where I'm from, that would be techno in steel industry spaces, and that was part of my youth. And so I worked with people in Stoke who were part of the Acid House revolution, who were dancing, who were there. And I suppose in the Sam Haile plate, in the Three Spinsters plate, I could see all of those things coming together. And so the three smaller pots, each with three women who aren't turned to stone, as they are in that image, but are free, and are dancing, and are facing the front, and sort of looking at you, or lost in their own worlds, and using their bodies freely and taking up space. That was how I wanted to interpret the women that are in the Three Spinsters.
OT: The Three Spinsters, there are various explanations for what that means. But it does link to Macbeth’s idea of three witches, doesn't it?
ET: There's something in Silvia Federici's book, she talks about women meeting at stone circles and different rock formations outside of villages or towns. So she suggests that they were also maybe being used in that period as a place to go to congregate as women and give each other strength in that period.
OT: They gave special status to the past, don't they? They're quite often used as markers for parish boundaries and things. They're fixed points on the landscape that have significance to people well back in the past and were given some kind of special symbol. I mean I think one of the things that one might ask you to respond to is the way Haile portrays women because that's a very distinctive way of drawing somebody. They're always naked and they're often disempowered. They appear to be managed and controlled. There are various ways in which you might read that. How would you respond to that?
ET: He was working a long time ago and we've had a lot of people do a lot of work on the male gaze since then and deconstruct the male gaze. That woman she's not facing us, she's naked and she's not got a head. So that was how it was. And a lot of the way that women would have been drawn then would have been turned away from you, their eyes wouldn't have been facing you, they wouldn't have been holding their own and being in their bodies. They would be without clothes. And I can understand that would be the culture he was in, but it's not the way I want to portray women. I want women in my work to be in their power, in their strength and using their bodies. So lots of my work, the women will be dancing or they'll be moving or they'll be active within their bodies. I've used women who've been yoga practitioners and held poses or women that are aerial performers, so they use their bodies in incredible ways. And the women have to be active. They have to be active, often they'll be facing, they may be lost in their own transcendence, but it's a powerful thing. They're facing you; they're looking at you.
Audience Discussion
Audience: Because this pot behind Fiona, that's female Morris dancers, isn't it?
ET: Yeah, so Boss Morris are an amazing all-female Morris group in Stroud. They combine traditional Morris very respectfully with new traditions and rave culture and they make all their own outfits and they're kind of UV orange and they're incredible. They've danced at the Brits and things like that. So I went down, it was before this show and in the gallery I wanted there to be a maypole in the middle, which was just a big trunk with a hand-sewn banner and the pots to sit around it, so you had to weave your way round. And I went and drew and photographed Boss Morris, they were really generous with their time. And from those drawings I started to think about Christian attitudes towards the power of women, the sexuality of women. And so it's like sort of combining the spaces that we have with the spaces that replaced them. Then also looking at that through a contemporary lens. And there’s a bit in here [gestures catalogue] where Sara Reed says Christian philosophers were worried about whether women even had souls at all. And of course, women needed ruling with a firm hand, since without male guidance they wouldn't be able to control their sexual urges. Women might be venerated while pregnant or nursing, as their halo pits more mothers, but they could easily slip into animalistic tendencies in the next moment. The bestial Morris dances of Emily stick a metaphorical finger up at these ancient notions. So that's said, more succinctly than I would be able to. But it's this idea of sticking a finger up at some of those ideas about women's sexuality and where the place for that is.
Audience: Have Boss Morris seen that work?
ET: Yes, they're really generous and supportive and have retweeted it and Instagrammed it and all that kind of thing.
Audience: Maybe we should invite them here to see the pot.
ET: Yeah, we should.
Audience: One thing that I love about your work, Emilie, is the industrial landscape of raves. You have got these industrial, residential landscapes integrated alongside motifs that are very arts and crafts. Where did that come from?
ET: It began because my family lived in lots of different places in Sheffield. My family are from quite a big famous council estate in Sheffield Manor Estate. I think Roy Hattersley called it the worst council estate in Britain. And it was always very interesting to me moving between different places. Some of my family lived in quite wealthy districts of Sheffield. So I'd be either too posh for one place or not posh enough for the other. Class then became something that was very interesting to me.
My grandma's council house was full of incredible patterns, every pattern from 1950 to 1990, all together in one place. And it was like this incredible clash of amazing colours and fabrics. And she probably did the most crafting with me as well when I was young. She just loved that house and it was beautiful. It had all these wonderful handmade fabric things throughout it. I also work a lot with people in drug and alcohol recovery to make work and use outdoor wood fire kilns and to think about alchemy and change together. So the pattern that's always been in my pots is a nod to the arts and crafts movement as well as our estates in Sheffield.
Audience: I think that's what's so interesting about looking at that with your work, Emilie, is playing on heritage, whether that's the heritage of rave, because that is a British heritage, or the heritage of industrial landscapes, or the heritage of slipware that goes back so far. Is that repeated?
ET: Slipware as well would be a meeting point. So a harvest jug would be a way that maybe a landowner at the end of harvest would take a cider or beer, depending on where he was in England, out to the workers, and they would share a drink together. So this big harvest jug, it could be quite symbolic, with these two parts of society meeting.
And slipware would be made in villages and towns from the clay that was local to them, and it would be decorated with stories, things like birds and marriages and deaths would be recorded on those plates and dishes. And then also coronations of kings and queens and what was happening in the church world. And then people would come together and use pots at harvest time to eat and celebrate together.
Techniques and Process
Audience: Can you tell us about the technique? What do you actually do on each stage?
ET: OK, so the first stage, I build it. And then while it's not thoroughly dried out, I have to get the slip. Slip is a clay, but it's a different colour so you have to get it on while the clay still has enough water in it because if it's really dry, it'll suck all the water out and the slip will crack off. And then, I have to layer up. The figures on there are three layers of slip and the background's one layer. And then I scratch all the lines, they're fired to 1000 degrees, they come out and then they're glazed. They're then fired to 1250 degrees. This project gave me the opportunity to work with a much redder clay and I'm always trying to get looser. My earlier work is much tighter. And I really liked much looser pottery. But this clay is fired to 1180-1200 degrees. And then I add the gold, it's real gold suspended in a liquid that when you paint it onto the glaze, you fire it again to about 700. Just warm enough so the liquid can evaporate and the real gold can bond with the glaze.
Audience: And there's lots of layers and tension in your work and textures. Do you plan that out first or does it just happen as you're telling the story on the pot?
ET: When I'm coiling, I'll start working with people and taking photographs and then I’ll put those photographs all over the walls and then it sort of absorbs and then I start to think. There were quite a few dancers that I met up with and everybody was dancing and people were taking turns. And then certain ideas will come to me there and then working with the people. There's quite a lot of screaming female Morris dancers and I think I'm going to do more work with that in the future, thinking about Horae as being the Greek goddess of nature, earth and justice.
Then once I've slapped all the slip on it, now this figure fits a lot better there, and I want to try and keep that dribble there. And then sometimes you put it on and it doesn't work with what you had in your head. So it's movable but it sort of happens alongside the building of the pot.
Audience: How long does it take for you to build and work on a pot without the glazing time?
ET: People always ask me this and I think, so this show was actually six pots. And I made six of them in six months. If you divide that up it would be a month apart. I can't really work on more than two at once because they'll get too dry. I've got a little boy now who's eight but before I had him I could just do all-nighters and get all the drawing done. But roughly a month apart with all the firing and everything.
Audience: And there's always some sort of time pressure like the clay drying or cracking.
ET: You have to work with it. But again, that’s the thing about the relationship with the land and natural materials. They're quite humbling and you have to enter into a dance with them in a way that we're often really not used to in our lives so much now. And if you try and push them too fast or do things differently they would all just split or clay would just crack.
Inspiration and Influence
Audience: Who do you admire? Who’s inspired you?
ET: Artemisia Gentileschi is very, very inspiring to me She was a painter, whose father was a painter. I feel you're very good at dates. Do you know the dates?
OK: Oh, I love the woman. 16th, 15th century. Yeah, she's quite, she's a really powerful person, isn't she? Very successful businesswoman at the time.
ET: She painted an incredible, huge painting of Judith slaying Holofernes, which if people remember the story, is where Judith lures Holofernes with wine and promises to her tent, and then her and her maid Abra cut his head off. And there's this painting where her and Abra are doing that, but it's somewhere between a table where you're creating life and having a baby, or a table where somebody's dying. She painted it again and again and again.
Tracy Emin inspires me a lot. She couldn't get her work shown in museums, so she made her own museum. I wrote my dissertation about her and about the way she was in the late 90s, early noughties. She was called the ‘tart of art’, the prostitute of art. And this was said in The Times and The Guardian. Everything referred to her sexually. It was really derogatory, the language that was used. And now she's Dame Tracy Emin. When I was 15 or 16, I saw those quilts about the young women's experience that were massive, talking about things I could relate to. I was just blown away that was in a gallery. That probably kept me going.
Bill Eglin's pots are incredible. I just absolutely love Bill Eglin's pots. And his, how loose his work is, his big jugs, his harvest jugs are amazing.
Audience: Ollie, who are you inspired by?
OK: Who am I inspired by? Oh, that's difficult. My backgrounds in archaeology so I got interested in ceramics through dealing with bits of it. I remember putting a pot together, a barrel/costrel with a spout on the top. But I didn't know what the object was. I managed to reassemble this thing and I got to the point where I figured out that it was one pot. It had two bases. And I got it together. And I just had this revelation that I was the first person to see that pot assembled since the person who made it. And to see it physically, the person who'd dropped it beside a well and was excavated. But I was the second person who'd made it. It just made me want to make things.
There's something about owning a pot that's made by someone you've met or you know. So, you know, Ray Finch. I've got one absolutely fantastic, great big one which is just one of my favourite objects. I like the fact that you can walk around them and read them. And we were talking earlier about the shapes in particular this large shape with that soft rim. It's almost like a collapsed inner tube. Is it a piece of tube? Yeah. It has that sort of, which gives a kind of uncertain solidity. It starts out being kind of firm and solid and then when you look at the rim you think, well, no, it looks like it's going to move when you touch it. That kind of contrary contradiction in it which shows is really exciting.
Audience: You've got handles on them.
OK: Yeah it gives them weight, doesn’t it? Shoulders.
Audience: Because a lot of your other pots don't have handles.
ET: No, you're right. It was hard putting them on. Then I was like, should I, shouldn't I? My studio mates even were like, hmm. And I tried them up and down they're kind of happy and proud. And it was a lot of thinking about those handles.
Audience: This exhibition has been brilliant and it's so beautiful to see it all together and see your works up so proud alongside the work of Sam Haile.
ET: Well, thank you. It's been an honour to have work next to Sam Haile’s and a joy to be able to see so much of Sam Hailes' work in one place. I'm really grateful to Jo who invited me to come and do this and saw my work at the Somerset Rural Life Museum where I did an installation. Tanya has also been amazing, and her stories about Sam, about the collection and her knowledge and passion is just absolutely infectious and it’s been lovely working with you. So I’m very grateful to both of you. And thank you Lucy for putting this all together. Thank you everybody.
Audience: Should we have a round of applause?
