Paul Cummins – Blood Swept Lands and Seas of Red

Photo: Massimo Crisafi/GuardianWitness

Blood Swept Lands and Seas of Red has been one of the most popular and successful artists' installations in my lifetime. Created by ceramic artist Paul Cummins, with a setting by stage designer Tom Piper, 888,246 ceramic poppies have been progressively laid in the moat of the Tower of London to commemorate the centenary of the start of World War One – each poppy representing a British or colonial service person killed in the war.

I was unable to visit whilst the poppies were 'growing' in size, and now that I have the time, the crowds are so immense I cannot get near it! Up to 4 million are expected to have visited before it closes. They have begun floodlighting it at overnight, so perhaps a late night or early morning visit is in order before it is dismantled on November 12th (just after Remembrance Day). However, with the prime minister now jumping on the bandwagon, the 'Wave' segment (which surrounds the entrance to the Tower) will now apparently be able to be viewed until the end of the month whilst volunteers remove the rest.

I discovered Paul Cummins' work back in June 2012 when I was creating my own 'ceramic flowers' from my vast collection of blue and white fragments for an outside installation at Creekside Centre. So I am really pleased his poppies have moved so many people. The piece above was made for Chatsworth House, and below are some of my 'flowers' – blue and white fragments attached to steel rods both short and tall, and 'planted' in the earth.

Since I posted in 2012, Paul has got a proper website – www.paulcumminsceramics.com. See him talking about the work on the Telegraph's website here. Such a nice guy! And great to see 'art' finally having some relevance and giving meaning to ordinary people.
 
Even though I had not yet seen the poppies, I purchased two (£25 each) at the beginning of October – one to be a Xmas present for my mother who's had a terrible year (a truly 'annus horribilus') after her home was flooded in February. This week George Osborne actually did something good for a change and decided to 'waive' the VAT so that £1million more could go to the six veterans' charities (Cobesco, Combat Stress, Coming Home, Help for Heroes, the British Legion and the SSAFA) benefiting from the sales. Both her brothers had careers in the RAF, her father served in the 2nd World War as did my father, but one uncle has relied heavily on Combat Stress for some years after serving in Northern Ireland. Plus, my late father's birthday is November 10th, the day before  Remembrance Day. Whether her gift will arrive in time now that part of the show might be extended is another matter!

The other important thing about this piece is that the poppies were made by hand in Derby by local people, using a traditional pottery production line that had to work 24/7 to produce them on time. If such a project had been masterminded by a corporate business (perhaps thought up by a clever advertising agency), they would probably have been manufactured very cheaply in a Chinese city factory and still sold for £25 each. With Paul's project however, there are echoes of Ai Wei Wei's porcelain sunflower seeds, which were not industrially produced but hand-crafted by hundreds of skilled artisans.

Update 13 November:

Yesterday it was a beautiful sunny day, so I finally jumped on the 188 bus and went up the road to see the installation, returning on the number 47. How I have left it so long when it is so near, I cannot explain! It was already being dismantled by lots of volunteers. Later in the evening I returned with a couple of friends to see the floodlit night time display.

 

London Art Fair 2013

A trip to London Art Fair (in the snow) yielded some interesting results: two artists working with Willow Pattern. I have flagged up both of them before, but never seen them at the Art Fair.

First up: Robert Dawson, showing on the Axisweb stand in the 'Art Projects' area. I first came across Dawson's work in July 2010 when he was showing at Jerwood Space, although he has been working with the Willow Pattern since at least 1996. I didn't see this piece then; in Spin, Dawson alludes to the spinning used to make a plate – but the only spinning here was done on his computer, then transfer printed onto bone china. Lovely.

c Robert Dawson Spin (detail) 2010.

Spin as it was shown in the Axisweb.org space

Second up: Paul Scott – who I discovered around the same time as Robert Dawson and who was part of the offering at Brighton gallery ink-d, who specialise in mostly urban/street art and were positioned on the mezzanine floor.

Hard to ignore on ink-d's stand was "artivist" (art activist) Carrie Reichardt aka The Baroness with her large politically slanted mosaics.

In the prestigious section on the ground floor near the entrance was Millennium Gallery showing German artist Caro Suerkemper who was working in porcelain and blue and white with an erotic narrative.

Meanwhile, back up in the Art Project space, Woolff Gallery were showing this by Keith Haynes. Not blue and white of course, but I mention it because I was cutting out vinyl records in 1997.

About an academic dissertation...

Another academic request recently received...

I am a PhD student and working on my dissertation about "Use of Readymade & Found Ceramics Tableware & Porcelain figurines in Contemporary Arts". I have prepared the questions in the below link to be answered by ceramics artists and related professionals from all over the world. Could you please fill out this questionnaire. That would be a great contribution to my doctoral dissertation. Thank you in advance for your valuable time.

Aygun Dincer Kirca
aygundincerkirca.blogspot.com/

Adriana Varejao

Just discovered the Brazilian artist Adriana Varejao. Her work "alludes to expansion and transformation of cultural identity, yet continues the use of her theme of understanding the past in order to understand the present."

From the Liverpool Biennial website:

"Adriana Varejão’s paintings are cultural and artistic excavations. In particular, they trace the historical conjunctions that have produced contemporary Brazilian art, including Portugal’s long history of cultural cross-fertilisation with China. This complexity is exemplified by Varejão’s incorporation of traces of the transplanted Chinese artistic tradition with the Baroque influences of colonial culture.

"Portuguese Catholicism has produced some startlingly violent imagery, with graphic representations of martyrdom and disrupted flesh that literally dismember the classical ideal of the human body. These images have been absorbed into the indigenous cultural traditions of Brazil, in turn influencing the style and content of local Christian iconography.

"Portuguese artists exploited the narrative potential of Chinese ceramic decoration, especially the cobalt blue that became so popular with Europeans. It is common in both Portugal and Brazil to find blue tile decoration on the outside of buildings. Inside churches, panels of these tiles often tell stories from the lives of the saints. These narratives invariably end badly, with bodily degradation, flaying, dismemberment and various forms of penetration. A very popular secular use of the same medium is found in butchers’ shops to promote their wares. It is common to find images of joints of meat, poultry or fish hanging on hooks in these situations. The parallels with religious iconography are hard to miss.

"Varejão recalls the curious sight of damaged ceramic panels that were restored at some time in the past without any apparent attempt to reconstruct the original design. As a result, the figures have been fragmented and the frame has appeared within the composition in a bizarre configuration. For a modern viewer this fragmentation and disruption of the frame has distinctly cubist (and indeed post-structuralist) overtones, but it is also a compelling metaphor for cultural bricolage. The artist has used this strange history of iconographic conjunctions as a starting point for her paintings, often referring back to the blue tiles."

Meanwhile, this piece by Adriana made in 1997, titled Tea and Tiles II, sold for £391,250 in June this year.

Top image: copyright Victoria Miro
Middle image: copyright Liverpool Biennial
Bottom image: copyright Christies