JW: Why have you placed flowers in the ceramic sculpture,
Totem?
FD: It’s really a sculpture inspired by vase structure, form
and histories. To house the flowers makes a lot of sense but without flowers
totally works too. All of these ceramic
pieces in the show have the ability to be candlesticks and candelabra too in different
configurations. ‘Totem’ is really heavy and takes five guys to lift. It’s made
of three pieces, which are lifted onto each other for the exhibition. Clay is
weird. These are hand-built slabs an inch and a half thick. It involved lots of
different techniques being used to produce these effects.
JW: I heard that you had to teach yourself and learn from
scratch?
FD: Yes, I had to learn how to make work in clay. I had a
great teacher. I taught myself to some extent, but Kurt Weiser, my
father-in-law and a ceramicist taught me. He’s really famous in his field in
the craft world. He also taught for years, so I had to go out there to study
with him in Arizona. I would ask him how do you do that? I learned a lifetime’s
ceramics in a month, which was a unique experience. We stayed up until 3 in the
morning and sometimes we accidentally broke things.
JW: Your paintings have a dizzying quality of stacked
elements incorporating architecture and domestic objects. What are the formal
or thematic effects are you trying to achieve?
FD: I am looking for something that is not static so
everything is interrupted or interfered with, which creates sense of movement.
In finishing one object you’re interrupted and it turns into something else. I
don’t want something to stay still. These paintings are really stacked. I think
of them as sculptures within in a space to some extent.
JW: What’s your starting point?
FD: To begin, I produce a schematic idea of a space and
start building something. Initially I have insane amounts of images that I sift
through before starting a work and at that point it’s quite freeing. I’m
looking at things formally and I search for difference. You’re starting with three points pulling in
different directions and then from there I react to it, but it’s not a mapped
out thing initially. It’s Important to get right in there. Each painting learns
from the one before.
JW: I read in a previous interview with Amy
Sillman that you don’t want to make a picture static. How do you create the
right balance and tension within a picture?
FD: I don’t want it to be completely dizzying. Parts happen
simultaneously not fifty things at once. Paint used to describe a face is also
pulled to describe a house. You get stuck in fused moments so that in new
paintings a couple of descriptions are happening at the same time. It’s a
tension between being overwhelming and being able to have a slippage, which is
something uncomfortable. Flowers may wilt but are not dead.
JW: What are the developments in your new work like the
painting ‘Damask’ (2012) on show in the exhibition?
FD: There’s a strong linear quality articulated in the rope
described in ‘Damask’. I was thinking about stitching things together like the undulation
that happens in sewing, weaving, crocheting and crafts. Through the interlocking
drawings of different things, abstractions are made in between so the space is
where the lines intersect.
JW: You appear to have a consistent interest in ‘craft’.
What draws you to that?
FD: As I get older, the more I have the desire to bridge
gaps. I make things and find ways of bring them together. I want to make a candelabra
next. I make a lot of things and I do a lot of sewing. It’s not a big leap.
There’s a direct relationship between ceramics and paintings. I find it
frustrating that there are a thread of adjectives that follow these crafts like
‘small’, ‘girlish’, ‘hippyish’ things. I take the same modes of making but over
scale them with a tougher hand.
JW: Why do you quote art and design history such as making
references to Delft pottery and ‘chinoisserie’?
FD: It’s about the history of the material whether it’s painting
or ceramics. Ceramics are quite hybrid and specific. I’m most interested in different
languages and histories but also the various ways of handling materials.
JW: So it’s hybridity of style and material that interests
you and the breakdown of those boundaries and histories?
FD: I want them to be non-hierarchical in a kind of dissolve
through juxtaposition and proximity of this difference. In some pieces, I used china
paint a historically revered gilding technique but also what grandmas do on
plates. I’m interested in really expensive antiques and a grandma’s taste in
plates, a huge range from tacky to nice. There’s a shift through proximity from
something beautiful to something disgusting.
JW: So one of the ceramic works can tip quickly from the
respectable to the vulgar?
FD: Yes, there’s a tablecloth in the painting ‘Damask’ that
has does a similar thing because it’s looks like both a baroque floral pattern
and a cheap tablecloth at the same time.
JW: So there’s an enquiry in your work about traditional
notions of fine art and class iconography while at the same time there’s a
dialogue around what’s undervalued and disregarded?
FD: Through that instability I’m making it less fixed, so
notions of high class or vulgarity are questioned.
JW: That has that been a challenge for other ceramicists
working in clay. In the craft tradition there’s been a distinction made between
craft and fine art, those who make pots and those who paint. You seem to be
interested in that cultural gap.
FD: I suppose it
depends on the pot. So I can’t defend all of them. In terms of the whole craft
argument, the gap is more about taste than craft. You can make anything if it’s
good out of anything, but I was in part drawn to ceramics for that cloud above
it. I was drawn to it for that ambiguity, that it’s separated out more than any
medium. Working with ceramics demanded this craft approach and that’s
fascinating to me.
JW: You can see that confusion in the way museums distinguish
between ‘fine art’ and ‘craft’.
FD: For ‘Totem’ it’s all porcelain and it doesn’t naturally
want to behave in this way on such a scale. You wouldn’t choose this kind of
clay to make big slabs from. There also all
these fingerprint marks in it and it shows crude handling, behaving more like
stoneware with grit in it. I was thinking about the Expressionist potter, Voulkos,
when I made it and giving it lots of surface decoration and making it out of
porcelain with an almost grotesque pattern and feminine overlay. The figurine
would be the kitsch element, but based on an 18th century piece
while also looking as if you could find it in a gift shop.
JW: How does your work sit in this curated show? What do you
learn from participating in this exhibition alongside other artists with a
curator in a public exhibition? Does it put your work in a new light?
FD: It’s probably too
early to ask. I only put in the flowers yesterday. But there’s an interesting
connection to the other artists in terms of language such as the shifts in
Matthew Chambers’ paintings from piece to piece and how they are installed. Albert Oehlen leaves mushy fingerprints over a
taped-off ‘fade’ in a painting and the space between those gestures and the digital
printing too with the expressionist hand over the top. I become more involved
in the hanging and arrangement of my work, which is probably related to growing
confidence and age.
JW: What you do want to do next? You mentioned making a candelabra
out of clay.
FD: I want to make a large, hanging, low chandelier that
would comprise clay and metal. It would cover a lot of different references in
terms of candlesticks. I want to do my own thing now having digested different
style histories. It would possess crude protruding extruding clay and produce lot
of different handling techniques.
JW: There’s a balance in your work between collapse and
something evolving, asserting form and volume. There’s so much dialogue and
quotation, such as the patterned surfaces.
Your interest seems to lie with pushing the possibilities of technique
and materials.
FM: Some of this is just piling on the glaze in the ceramic
sculptures, as if in the process of learning. It’s harder rendering effects
this way. Technically being out of control is actually hard to achieve. The
quantities are shocking. The sculptures appear haphazard as if a student had
made them but it takes a lot of piling on and I mixed all the crackling glaze
myself. You still have to have know the direction you’re taking.
JW: For all its mashed together and jagged appearance, there’s
a completion in ‘Totem’ that feels whole.
FD: You could intervene and break Totem after firing but ‘brokenness’
is different from my rugged handling of the material. The finished work is not
meant to look ‘archaeological’. It’s really important to me that through all
this fracturing that it comes back together to being whole again. Like the
paintings, I don’t want to create a dizzying, empty space. I want to build a
‘wholeness’ at the end of the process. Formal connections in the work are what
interests me, for example, how the grid in ‘Diptych’ (2008) resembling a ship’s
mast relates to the grid of a chair, the inside of an umbrella or holes within
a ladder, so that everything has a structural similarity. ‘Diptych’ moves from
panel to panel and some of it gets lost. I look at everything as a source. I
started with the fade from dark grey to light in house paint that was really a reductive
landscape, moving from a Richter-like palette knife effect to oil. I rip up
lots of books and have piles of images in my studio. The ‘schlocky’ figures in
that painting are from an art history book.
JW: Were you ever conscious of failing when you were making
‘Totem’?
FD: This piece was meant to fail. My father-in-law said there
was too much happening to complete it, but I said I was fine making it by
myself. I was working in a school environment and not my studio so the works felt
vulnerable. It was weird and I didn’t have full control so some work was
destroyed and I couldn’t accept it. ‘Totem’ was designed to make up for it. I
worked for two weeks on my own when the school was closed over Christmas and it
was really depressing. The process is slow and the clay is fragile before
firing. Instinctively, I had a better sense of weight and space than I had
expected having only painted before.
JW: It’s an example of how you learn by falling back on your
own resources and pushing through. I see you are giving a talk to accompany the
exhibition. Is it important to find a ‘language’ to discuss your work?
FD No, I really don’t think it is necessary but I’m happy to
do it. It can be interesting, but the work stands on its own.
JW: Where is your practice moving now? You’ve developed a particular language in your
paintings and sculptural ceramics. There’s a nice articulation now across media
of shared interests and themes. Can you see what you’ll be doing in future?
FD: I will be working for a show at the Blaffer Museum in Houston
opening next winter, so I want to make paintings and sculpture using new materials
like acqua resin. I will aim to produce greater height in the ceramic
sculptures without the weight and fragility because clay can make them
super-heavy. There’s no way to fire them in New York and they are very
expensive to make. That’s one of the reasons I went out to Arizona to use a
special kiln. I need to work in sections. From working with ceramic glazing,
the surfaces of my paintings are becoming more articulated. There’s a lot more
variety. Having used cake decorating extruder tips for the ceramics, I’m now
using them to make paintings.
Francesca DiMattio discussing her last exhibition @Zabludowicz_Col with @Joshuaswhite | http://t.co/Ssc46EdIKh
— Pippy Houldsworth (@PippyHG) July 11, 2013
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