Wordsworth and Basho: Walking Poets, Kakimori Bunko, Itami

A modified version of the 2014 exhibition 'Wordsworth and Basho: Walking Poets', which was held at the Wordsworth Museum in Grasmere, will be on display at Kakimori Bunko, Itami, Japan, from 17 September to 3 November 2016. I have made new work for this exhibition based on research undertaken during my ceramics residency in Seto, Japan. 

Again, my work responds to themes of memory and the ephemerality of the human condition in the work of both Basho and Wordsworth. While Basho often revisited ruins and other sites of communal memory, Wordsworth was concerned that human endeavour – including monuments and works of literature – was at risk of destruction through catastrophe and would be outlasted by nature. This work takes as inspiration Wordsworth’s The Ruined Cottage and the well-known ‘summer grass’ haiku from The Narrow Road to the Deep North composed by Basho when he visited the abandoned estate at Hiraizumi, in 1689.

In a haiku written in 1678, Basho refers to the annual procession made by Dutch traders from their enclave in Dejima, Nagasaki, to pay homage to the Shogun in distant Edo. During the Edo Period (1600–1868), it was only the Dutch and Chinese who were permitted to trade with Japan, providing a limited portal to the world. Pottery sherds recovered from Dejima show that the Dutch took British ceramics, including transfer-printed Sunderland pottery, to Japan in the nineteenth century. Through form and surface decoration, my work explores the idea of hybridity, blending east and west, and attempting to show commonalities in the work of both poets. My porcelain vessels feature imagery derived from research into ruined industrial sites in Seto, a traditional centre of Japanese pottery production. Setomonogatari is a portmanteau  word formed from Setomono – the traditional term for Seto pottery – and monogatari, meaning ‘story’. Blades of glass grass grow from the vessels, suggesting the endurance of nature over culture. 

Work made for the show: Setomonogatari 5 – Iga to Nagasaki (2016)

Porcelain, glaze, pink lustre, ceramic decals, glass, mixed media, 

Approx. 45 x 24 x 22 cm

Photo: Jo Howell, 2016

Setomonogatari 6 – The Ruined Cottage (2016)

Porcelain, glaze, pink lustre, ceramic decals, glass, mixed media, 

Approx. 43 x 24 x 22 cm

Photo: Jo Howell, 2016

Objects in Motion: Material Culture in Transition

I exhibited work from the George Brown Series as part of Objects in Motion: Material Culture in Transition, an interdisciplinary conference held at the Centre for Research in Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities (CRASSH), University of Cambridge, 18-20 June 2015. My display in the Alison Richards Building will continue until September.

The George Brown Series is a group of ceramic vessels made in response to the George Brown Collection which I researched as part of an AHRC international placement at the National Museum of Ethnology (NME) in Osaka,  Japan. George Brown accumulated over 3000 ethnographic specimens while serving as a missionary in Oceania between 1860 and 1907. Described as ‘one of the most mobile collections in the world’, it has had a number of homes over the years, exercising the endeavours of a variety of people.

The George Brown Series was inspired by my research at the NME which focused on ‘transitional’ artefacts, in which influences from both the originating community and the European colonisers were manifest. A series of bamboo tubes from the Solomon Islands scrimshawed with scenes of European and indigenous encounters were of particular interest as they reminded me of some of the maritime imagery I was familiar with from my work on nineteenth century Sunderland pottery. These items spoke of the ‘creolization and hybridity’ characteristic of the colonial experience.

My porcelain vessels collage a range of visual and contextual information in order to communicate something of the collection’s complex history. Dutch traders took Sunderland pottery to Japan and it is not inconceivable that some pieces might have made it to Oceania. The George Brown Series exploits this conceit, imagining what a fusion of Solomon Island lime containers and Sunderland pottery might look like filtered through twenty-first century Japan.

Read more about the George Brown Collection here.

A selection of porcelain vessels from the George Brown Collection (2013-15).

A detail of my display at the Alison Richards Building, University of Cambridge.

Instagram image of my installation at the Alison Richards Building, University of Cambridge.