Internationalism at Aberystwyth 2001

Festival report by Jeffrey James

When faced with the challenge of commenting on such an experience, an understandable resposne might be to falter at the prospect of making comparisons. What can we say when faced, for example, with makers who come from such different places as Hungary, South Africa and the US. We could talk about technical matters, always a usefull fallback, but does that do us and our chosen medium any justice? Or we could talk about clay as an international language, but even if the Aberystwyth Festival shows that there is a measure of truth in such an adage, it also shows that there is a huge variety of idalects and accents which mark out a seemingly endless range of ceramic territories and populations.

Garth Clark is right: Potters like to herd. This memorable image from his introductory talk at the Festival on the Friday evening struck a chord with an audience representing a good cross section of the interna-tional ceramics community. He likened us all to Caribou, moving together from place to place and there was certainly a sense of group solidarity and belonging on the part of the 900 or so people present at the Arts Centre in Aberystwyth on. the hill overlooking the sea. The sun shone on our grateful Caribou backs; an event to be welcomed but riot necessarily anticipated in Wales, even in high summer.

Many factors contribute to the success of an event like this and one of them is the ability to offer a program which invites participation and responses at many levels. The main stage demonstrations took place is usual in the Great Hall but the program of simultaneous events at this and the other two venues, the theatre and the cinema, meant that, for many people, hard choices had to be made in order to get the most out of a full weekend. Here the analogy of the herd breaks down; our differences as individual members of this broad culture we call ceramics' often outweigh our similarities. Those endless nuances, preferences and prejudices in which ceramists delight, are both catered for and exaggerated over the duration of such a festival. For example, on more than one occasion in the Great Hall the customary pair of demonstrators traded looks and banter across that often visited and well-defended potter/sculptor divide. It was all good-natured enough, but it takes a delicate balancing act on the part of the organisers to make sure that all shades of the ceramic spectrum are given due weight and exposure.

The short introductory slide shows on the Friday evening gave an indication of this diversity and also an opportunity to put faces to established reputations and perhaps to note new faces being exposed to an international gaze for the first time. With so many guest speakers to get through, time-keeping was necessarily Fred Olsen's transformer kiln strict. But even with the few rninutes available to him Fred Olsen impressed with his can-do spirit. It was easy to envy his daring, his energy, his achievement, and also his house and pool, self-built in the desert.

Olsen's distinctly American story unfolded over the next two days. He told it in many ways; through his bearing and stance in relation to the world, through his pots, through the 'transformer' kiln that was built and fired during the weekend and, most extraordinarily, through a film made on an extended visit to Japan in the 1960s. These silent, flickering' rued by Olsen's eloquent five images, accompanied commentary were by turns informative, eerie and intensely moving. Studying under Tomimoto Kenkichi at the cerarnics department of Kyoto City College of Fine Arts, Olsen struggled to learn in an unfamiliar environment acutely conscious of his position is a naive Westerner in a sophisticated world of Oriental ceramics.

Olsen's isolation was occasionally relieved by visits from his father, an airline pilot whom we saw arriving in and departing from japan, his uniformed figure framed against a background of Jetliners and airport architecture that looked both pristine and faded, modern and old-fashioned in the grainy, black and white film. Olsen's commentary did not falter as we watched pictures of his father's aeroplane taking off for the last time, soon to be lost over the Pacific Ocean. Olsen returned to America and set about building kilns and also a reputation as a fiercely independent maker. He made it all happen for himself crossing frontiers in his pottery and in his life.

The South African ceramist - and entrepreneur Fee Halsted-Berning showed a similarly indomitable spirit. She was accompanied at Aberystwyth by 'Wonderboy' Thokozani Nxumalo, one of the artists who work as part of the Ardmore Ceramic Art Studio in KwaZulu Natal South Africa, which was set up by Halsted-Berning in the early 1990s. If Fred Olsen's life and career call be seen to exemplify an American narrative, then the story of Ardmore is one that shows the possibilities and struggles of a different continent. At Ardmore ceramics is both the subject matter of an impressive local success story and the setting in which big and sometimes uncomfortable issues such as heroism, colonialism and inequality are played out.

It is impossible to ignore the social structure of South Africa in any discussion of Ardmore ceramics. It was a poignant and unforgettable moment on the Sunday afternoon when Halsted-Berning, with Wonderboy at her side, began her presentation about Ardmore with a reminder to the critics who had taken her to task over the weekend concerning the way that she talked to and about Wonderboy. Here was a part of the complex history of South Africa played out in front of us Halsted-Berning - white, privileged, articulate - had worked with vision and determination to give opportunities to black people whose horizons were circumscribed by their birth, education and, most cruelly of all by their health prospects. In prompting Wonderboy to speak, encouraging him to lose some of his natural reticence and find a voice, was this nothing more than all extension of Halsted-Berning's concern and ambition for him and his co-workers or do we join her critics in seeing this is yet another example of patronising colonialism?

The answer, surely. is to be found to a great degree in the work produced at Ardmore which is confident and vibrant, not only with colour, imagery and decoration but also with ideas. The first artist to work with Halsted-Berning in the early days of Ardmore was her maid Bonnie. Bonnie's work showed a creative Intelligence which allowed her to call up and integrate elements from her own personal history, from that of her immediate culture and from a wider world beyond her immediate environment. Out of the blue, Bonnie and Halsted-Berning were jointly awarded the Standard Bank Young Artist Award for Visual Art. This prize was instrumental in giving a degree of financial security to Bonnie and launching the reputation of Ardmore. Bonnie bought a Toyota pick-up truck and proudly portrayed that in her work. No more prizes will come Bonnie's way; she, like many of the other Ardmore artists during the past few years, has died of AIDS.

It is a tribute to the supportive, working culture of the Ardmore studios that there is to be found there a creative space in which themes can be explored and issues of both contemporary and historical relevance call be pursued. Wonderboy Nxumalo makes the most of these possibilities in his work, often using words in conjunction with images to comment on the AIDS pandemic and on the events of the Anglo-Zulu war. We were privileged at Aberystwyth to be able to look anew at this episode in British/South African history through the Zulu Tales exhibition which after the Festival, was due to tour to Brecon, the home of the Royal Welsh Fusiliers who fought against the Zulu warriors. This exhibition included work by many Ardmore artists, including Wonderboy whose contribution was outstanding. There is a sensitivity apparent in his ceramics which is that of a true artist, reflecting truthfully and imaginatively on a life and a history which he has been given, but which he is learning to shape.

A different perspective on South African ceramics was evident in the work and presence of Jabu Nala. Unlike the work produced at Ardmore which is without precedent, the work of Jabu and her female relatives, especially her mother Nesta Nala falls into a more readily recognisable 'tradition' of pottery making. The making processes are what we might expect: coiled pots, smoothed with a stone, minimal but effective decoration - and a quick method of firing using easily obtained, locally-sourced fuel, in this case often a mixture of car tyres and wood. There is also much that is unexpected about this work, for example, many of the finished pots look like they are intended for cooking but in Jabu Nala's Zulu culture metal rather than ceramic utensils, have been used for cooking for many years. Ceramic pots are used for brewing beer but the market for Jabu Nala's ware is not a local one; it is gallery work that she produces arid it is more often than not bought by tourists. Jabu purposely lives in the town, having moved there from the Country in order to be near her buyers.

There is a subtle and sophisticated process of assimilation and transformation going on here in which we are all involved: maker, consumer, viewer and writer. Ceramics, like just about everything else now, takes place on a global stage and it often seems that the more that any pot or ceramic artefact seems to speak of a particular locality, the greater the likelihood is that it will find a home elsewhere: it will have a life beyond its own world. Further, it is not just the pot that is required to perform on this global stage, there is an increasing expectation that the maker too will present themselves for the benefit of festival goers like ourselves at Aberystwyth. Both Wonderboy Nxumalo and Jabu Nala offered different versions of Zulu ceramics and it is pointless to worry about which, if either of them, fits best with our idea of what is most authentic or true to the South African experience. These ceramists have taken the opportunity to gain a measure of control over their lives through making pottery and what is more, through making it with skill and imagination. They are surely entitled to use ceramics, not just to tell their own story, but to make that story as well.

In another continent again, Atilla Albert is the proprietor of one of the 15 potteries in the village of Magyarszombatfa in the Orseg region of Hungary. The village is close to the Slovenian border, a geographical fact which has had a significant bearing on the fortunes of the pottery. For many years under the Cornmunist regime the region was closed to outsiders because of its proximity to the border, but now that same proximity is opening it up to visitors, especially Germans.

The change in the political climate has had other repercussions, not least the closure of the ceramics factory which used to offer apprenticeships. Albert is adapting well to these changes and makes a range of pottery based on traditional patterns (including a 'dinner carrier' used for carrying food into the fields) as well as a more elaborately decorated range of work.

SMost families in his village rely in some way on pottery for a livelihood and their market is increasingly reliant on visitors. Albert was an impressive demonstrator, sitting to the side of his wheel and kicking the flywheel directly with his bare foot while his daughter Anita translated and added some commentary of her own. Anita had brought with her a presentation about her pottery village on CD Rom made by her in the local library, and this emphasised how quickly now all our worlds are changing. Borders are disappearing, both geographically and electronically, and new technology is speeding up the ways that information is exchanged. Globalisation is a word that is rapidly entering all our vocabularies and it is a factor with which we as ceramists will increasingly need to contend.

Jeffrey Jones is a Research Fellow at the Centre for Ceramic Studies, UWIC, Cardiff School of Art and Design.