Clay bowls, text and digital media
In 2011, Nicola joined an adult education ceramics class and began working with earthenware and stoneware clays. She found herself trying to create a bowl as thin as an eggshell. As she started a new bowl over and over again, she became deeply involved in seeing how far it could be pushed in terms of thinness until it cracked, or broke.
Emotional and physical fragility became expressed. She found that she was being led into questioning fundamental issues of containment and safety. This led to connections with the Coalition Government’s ‘austerity’ programme of cuts to benefits and public services – and with the resistance to these draconian measures. The targets of so-called government ‘welfare reform’ were disabled people, those living with chronic illnesses and mental distress. Many attending the ceramics classes were directly affected by intimidating new assessment processes, punitive financial sanctions and the pervasive atmosphere of scapegoating and fear. This state-sponsored disability hate was compounded by severe cuts in adult arts education, and access to the classes was under attack with the removal of concessionary rates and a demand that all participants pay unsubsidised rates. Fees for some went up from £45 to £172 each term. The class was under threat. Nicola and other adult education students launched a defiant campaign to save all the art classes – which succeeded in restoring the concessionary rates for those living on welfare benefits.
Considering resistance and resilience led her to then experiment with mending, or not mending, allowing the bowls to remain in whatever state they found themselves, keeping what she had scraped away as valuable fragments. She began to think of herself as a kind of archaeologist: excavating, discovering, brushing away deposits to reveal the object and its story underneath.
The objects emerged as expressions of how she felt about her body, her Chronic Fatigue/ME and the child within her as well as her position in relation to her environment and contemporary political events. Inscribing text and exploring limits, she rejected glaze in favour of the raw, naked quality of bare clay. Frustrated with the limits of the weekly ceramic class, she bought modelling clay and carried on making bowls at home in round-bottomed cereal and mixing bowls she had in her kitchen cupboard.
Writing and visual text
At first she wrote a diary after each making session, recording the process and the feelings she had while making the work. Then she began writing during the process, and made a series of small books. She took this creative writing and began to refashion it as poetry, prose, prose poetry and scratched text. She is now writing a book, How to Be Strong, connected to the installation, which uses her diary, process writing, crafted poetry and prose connected to the work, and a critical analytical essay – together with luminous photographs of the bowls and writings.
Fragments of this text, which explores deeply personal and political matters, are integrated into the labelling process (alongside more formal element such as titles and dates) so that the labels become part of the work and interact with the bowls and the text in the bowls.
Installations
How To Be Strong has been installed in wide range of exhibition spaces, including the Tower Bridge Engine Rooms, Peckham Space and the Jeremy Bentham Room at University College, London. Each installation has been unique and visitors have engaged interactively with the material on show. An addition to the writings and bowls was a wall-mounted list-piece entitle How Are Things Held Together? Visitors were invited to add ideas to the list on display! It was fun.
