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I
have been making objects in clay for fifty years, and originally trained
in the Anglo-Oriental tradition. I made objects for the kitchen and the
table and I am on reflection surprised that it took me such a long time to
realize that I had felt little identification with this work. I neither
cooked (it was not a syllabus subject for boys in the 1950s) nor felt any
affinity for the mugs and jugs that I was making. Nor did I identify with
the great ceramic traditions of China, Japan and the East. I had traveled
and visited museums throughout Europe and was more familiar with and
excited by Western artists – Picasso and Klee, Moore, Nicholson and the
primitive Wallis, and I had tried to find a way by which, both consciously
and intuitively, I could absorb such influences into my own contemporary
work. Such a creative challenge inevitably meant a sometimes sharp change
of tack in the direction in which the work evolved. I feared this, feeling
that it would be accompanied by accusations of ‘jack of all trades, master
of none’. But time has suggested that it was essential for that
stimulation which can awaken the sense of wonder in the world. Looking
back upon those fifty years of making, it becomes very much clearer as to
what actually is the driving force in my work. I was not fully aware of a
dormant but powerful sense of my Englishness, and I now see that it
pervaded every step of my developing voice. Just as English music, at the
beginning of the century, needed to find an independent voice, with Vaughn
Williams and Elgar for instance, so I felt that my inspirations should
come not from Oriental or American patterns, but from English traditions-
our landscape and our weather, our myths and legends, and all that makes
me uniquely me. To find such relevant colours and forms, sonorous with
history, and yet new and alive in today, has led to a very sharp change of
tack. I now make sculptures which often in a completely unanticipated way,
though at other times very consciously, create a link between my unknown
and unknowable English heritage and the continuing awareness of a sense of
wonder at my present human condition. My landscape is about objects and
situations which are familiar to me. It’s a tapestry which is no more than
a repeat of our ancient past and that which is unconsciously within us.
John Maltby September 2009 |
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