Metaphors for a malleable potential

File Note publication text by Jareh Das with interludes by Phoebe Collings-James

During World War II, we bought sealed plastic packets of white, uncolored margarine, with a tiny, intense pellet of yellow coloring perched like a topaz just inside the clear skin of the bag. We would leave the margarine out for a while to soften, and then we would pinch the little pellet to break it inside the bag, releasing the rich yellowness into the soft pale mass of margarine. Then taking it carefully between our fingers, we would knead it gently back and forth, over and over, until the color had spread throughout the whole pound bag of margarine, thoroughly coloring it. I find the erotic such a kernel within myself. When released from its intense and constrained pellet, it flows through and colours my life with a kind of energy that heightens and sensitises and strengthens all my experience.

Audre Lorde, The Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power

Embodied and fragmented, yet disobedient, sculptural objects evident in their break away from the  formal conventions of a medium historically rooted in classist ideals, gendered domesticity and functionality, Phoebe Collings-James’s ceramic sculptures embrace ambiguous and liminal spaces. They reposition the image of the maker as a Black queer woman and are imbued with performative gestures pertinent to their creation. Traces of the maker (hand, touch, imprint) are still evident even after surfaces have been glazed, fired, marked, inscribed and painted on. They are highly personal in both their subject matter and physical form. 

My first introduction to Collings-James was through Emmanuel, a mutual friend who had suggested they initiate a studio visit during a trip to New York in 2017. This encounter never happened but I did look her up online discovering a sculpture-centred practice extending to  film, performance, drawing, sound and ceramics. I was struck by her flesh-like ceramic tongues, sensual yet also assembled as if they had been violently removed from a body.… She has since returned home to London extending her personal ceramics practice to Mudbelly, an explorative pottery space encompassing a shop and roaming teaching facility offering free ceramics courses to Black people, led by Black ceramicists. Her approach draws inspiration from the legacy of African-American ceramicist, Doyle Lane whose innovative and visceral ceramics practice created a socially conscious and sustainable business for himself, which was a vital contribution to West coast ceramics and a remarkable achievement in the face of racism and economic inequity that surrounded him in the 1970s California. 

Collings-James’ anti-disciplinary approach interrogates  an imploding of power relations that are intimately related to the process’ of working with clay, and to individual and collective vulnerabilities understood through Black feminist writers including Audre Lorde, Sylvia Wynter, Dionne Brand, Alice Walker and Octavia E. Butler. Wynter’s intellectual project in particular is worth mentioning as a reference due to discussions on how science emerges in her writings and enabled ‘a conceptualisation of the human which generates a discordant symphony of (post)humanist thought that enlivens and “wakes up” our thinking of what it means; and has meant to be human beyond the genre of white, European, heteronormative “Man”.’ 

Wynter also speaks about being ‘hybridly human’ as a way to  envision new futures of being beyond the category of Man which point to epistemic pathways of decoloniality not predicated on anger. She writes:

Human beings are magical. Bios and logos. Words made flesh, muscle and bone animated by hope and desire, belief materialised in deeds, deeds which crystallise our actualities.

And the maps of spring always have to be redrawn again, in undared forms. 

[Vessels, flesh-y, suspended in a state of becoming….]

The works I encountered through my screen-based research were from the artist’s solo exhibition Choke on Your Tongue at the Italian Cultural Institute, London in 2015. These works, I have since found out, marked the first time Collings-James worked with ceramics as the result of time spent on the Nuove//Residency in Italy - a programme aimed at international artists interested in gaining skills,  and experimenting in the medium.  

A series of ten bright flesh-coloured tongues bearing the title Lingua, 2014 were scattered on a low-level white plinth, whilst with Medusa, 2014, smaller red flickering tongues burst out of an ambiguous (torso-like) vessel trying to contain them. A lone,larger  muscular tongue titled Creep (Orange and Moss), 2014 was placed casually on a gilded cream and mint green chaise lounge, as if left behind, but behind from where...severed from whom….? All of these sculptural objects exist in their own agency whilst performatively escaping the bodies that once contained them. This brings to mind the biblical phrase ‘severed tongue’ which might be read as a metaphor for emancipation from the heaviness of language and speech as Moses declared to God “I am heavy of mouth and heavy of tongue.” (Moses to God, Exod. 4:10).  

Choke on Your Tongue points to an examination of the unseen body through ceramic sculptures in both concept and materiality to produce works with fleshy, organ-like, slippery and sexual qualities which acknowledge the historical framing of the human body as a tension between scientific endeavors and religious systems of  belief. Fluctuating as specimens and relics, her sculptures deconstruct the human form into fragmented parts revealing at times a distorted but familiar anatomy. In doing so, perhaps the viewer is awakened to a new sense of wonder surrounding investigations of the body. 

​​The performative object, in my view,  represents a ‘curve of tension’ that unfolds as an interruption of the norm, followed by a stage of questioning, reflection, and creating or re-shaping of interaction with such an object. Objects confronting the viewer with a situation that unsettles normative action or thinking. 

Invoking metaphors:

“The tongue is a sharp and perilous weapon, which we are bound to keep up in the sheath.”

“The tongue is a fire, a world of iniquity.”

“The tongue is a muscular organ covered with mucous membrane, and is richly supplied with blood-vessels and nerves.”

“It seemed to me that Fire-Tongue was some sort of mark."

[metaphors for a malleable potential]

In her most recent ceramic objects, sculptures and installations made while in residence at Camden Art Centre for the exhibition A Scratch! A Scratch!, Collings-James weaves elements of personal narrative, myth, history, and interpretive analysis into a vibrant tapestry that reflects the textured, embodied, and performative nature of both working with clay and its resulting artworks. 

She also takes up the challenge of determining what it means for the work to exist visually in the form of sculpted, metaphorical clay vessels revealing tensions between the private and the spiritual, public and the political. It becomes useful then  to read the bodies of work currently being developed instead, as situations or expressions of the entanglement of several domains of practice connected to everyday or familiar looking objects, and the repetitive practices in working with clay that reject normative theories about the human body and object histories. Floating glazed armours; vessel-like forms; a head with a braided rod sticking out of its nose;  large vessels (wells) doubling as sounding devices amplifying an audio work of composed and recorded sounds;  large tile-like scrolls with motifs on their surface ranging from lines to incisions, scratches to symbols from Ashanti folklore (Anansi the spider-trickster); abstract swathes of paint expressing movement, action and much more. All reflecting entanglements within several domains of practice (erotics, violence, sexuality, desire) that constantly reminds the viewer of the fact that making a ceramic object is as intrinsic as it is repetitive. 

Heartbreak and its resulting solitude is a thread the artist cites as connecting these bodies of work which also serves to motivate and organise a heterogeneous array of shorter tales, anecdotes, and parables. The exhibition takes its title from Romeo and Juliet By William Shakespeare Act 3, Scene 1 where a scene of sudden violence and fatality reminds the reader of masculine notions of bravado, status  and ego  which underscore this tale of love. As the artist notes: ‘the abundant metaphors move both tenderly and violently through the body, in the play, and in the ceramic sculptures.” The armors suspended, some dripping with cream, blue and white glaze bordered by woven plaits show how the matrix of eroticism, desire, obedience, and suffering is more complex in the power inversions generated by the transgression in this sub-tale, while the homoeroticism derives from a well-established English (Shakesperian) literary trope.

[The lust and machismo of friendship. Chaos of Love. Conflict without resolution. They have made worms' meat of me].

[Wetness and tensile materials….]

To take up working with clay to some extent requires an acceptance of dealing with constant ruptures (failures) in the making process as mishaps occur at any stage. Working with clay represents a constant process of negotiation with the unexpected from glazing mishaps to cracked pots and dramatic kiln explosions, all of which are typical and all-too-familiar to those who spend time working with a medium that demands a wealth of knowledge, patience, and painstaking skills. Collings-James explained Clay’s ritual (and repetitive) technologies to me in an email exchange: “I think of this fact that my wrist is currently strained from throwing, the anticipation and regular event of opening up a kiln to see that the forms have decided to twist or melt in directions opposite to my own plans for them.” “Clay is malleable, yes, but it also shapes you as it is reciprocal and it has limits.” Within this context, her sculptures and objects express a certain level of self awareness and at times that physiological expressions are serene, self empowered and inviting, while at others they appear introspective, uneasy and distressed. The juxtaposition of performative gestures and lived experiences onto three dimensional objects provides a perspective to remind us all that in seeking relatedness between objects, the tiniest detail can connect to a much wider range of semantics, ideas and social realms. This  might lead to shaping of  self perceptions of the body which oscillates between the physical, functional, abstract, and spiritual.

Quote 

‘You must harmonize your own heart,’ said Ola. ‘Only you will know how you can do that, for each of us it is different’ ‘

- Alice Walker, The Temple of My Familiar

Reading list

Alice Walker, The Temple of My Familiar

Ursula Leguin, The word for world is forest

Magdalene Odundo, in conversation w/ Ben Okri, The Journey of Things

Harun Morison, When and where to become a spider

Linton Kwesi Johnson, Poems

The autobiography of The autobiography, Dionne Brand

The Uses of the Erotic, Audre Lorde.

Listening

Janet Jackson, Any Time, Any Place

Faithless, Miss U less, See U more

Beverley Glenn-Copeland, Don’t Despair

Watching 

Our Song, 2000

Romeo and Juliet, Baz Lurhman, 1996

Rocks, 2020?