Phoebe Cummings - Ceramics Artist in Residence

An oasis

08 December 2010

Birmingham 2009/10

For eight months I lived on a street just off spaghetti junction on the M6.  At the bottom of the interchange was a row of semi-detached houses, which I passed most days.  One house in particular stood out.  Its front garden was crammed with palms and other tropical looking plants, seemingly defiant or oblivious to their location.  The thick vegetation narrowed the path so as visitors to and from the property were swallowed or emerged like explorers.  Each day I tried to imagine the view from inside the house, like an endless cinema where the curtains must part to reveal the same opening scene: dense with prehistoric foliage in the foreground, beyond which cars curve infinitely through the sky on an elevated knot of concrete.  

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Greenland 2008

I don’t remember if it was afternoon or evening, the three-month arctic night had already fallen.  Days and nights were slippery.  His wooden house was near the top of the hill beside the cemetery, where snow heaped in soft, sleeping mounds.  On the window ledge was a tin can in which seedlings were beginning to grow.  A table lamp drooped from a noose above them as an apologetic, surrogate sun. 

From the kitchen to the lounge stretched a chaotic network of branches, rope and colourful plastic.  Two grey parrots preened and performed endlessly about the structure.  They screamed loudly if attention strayed from them, even for a moment.  He no longer used the upstairs of the house. Instead, he slept on a sofa bed, submissive to the protests of the exotic pair.  We ate a traditional Persian meal and drank beer he had brewed using a mail order kit.  We talked about his journey from Iran as a refugee seventeen years ago, and about his recent journey to the arctic with his birds.  It is likely they will outlive him. 

The interior of the room was warm and heavy with cigarette smoke, spices and the distinct tone of animals that belong to the wild.  The landscape outside the window seemed distant and contained.  Light reflected by the moon, illuminated the frozen slope of the town, down to the sea and its slow floating ice.  There it was, the north, sparkling like a cabinet of china and glass on the wall.

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Overgrown

26 October 2010

 In 2009 I made several visits to the closed Spode factory site in Stoke-on-Trent.  I collected a number of things from the factory floor, including an abandoned copy of J.G.Ballard's novel The Drowned World.  The found book was damp and growing several types of mould so I bought a new copy which I have read and re-read several times over the past year.  It describes London as it sinks below water and silt, with climatic changes causing plants and animals to revert to that of the triassic age.  It is full of incredible images, such as the Ritz hotel marooned and covered in moss.

An island aside

20 September 2010

Sometimes the studio feels like an island aside of time.  Inside this glass case I move around in a landscape of my own construction, distilled from the objects which surround me.   Sometimes people watch through the glass, sometimes I watch people watching.  Often there is the thud of a head against the window from a misjudged closer look.  Reflections of the island fragment the view of the room beyond.  I think about the rows of figurines captured in their individual scenes as I take photographs inside this scene of my own making.    

Hidden worlds

29 July 2010

Last week I had the chance to see more of the work that happens behind the scenes at the museum, including the technical workshops and conservation department.  I had never thought much before about the hidden structures that exist between the building and the objects.  In the workshops, mounts were being made for pieces of jewellery which looked like intricate shadows of the objects themselves.

Visiting the conservation department made me see objects in the museum more like living organisms, with humidity, temperature and light controlled in their environments.  Their materials expanding, contracting, producing gases and disintegrating.  The time and care that is invested in making objects last poses an interesting contrast to the temporary nature of my work in the studio, though at different rates both are in continual states of change.

After The Death of The Bear  (unfired porcelain, sieve)

Peak (unfired clay)