Personal Journal

Somebody schooled in Western European Art might describe what I do as sculpture. If this is so, the content of the sculpture deals with ideas about pottery. I chose to call myself a potter in support of the gradual acceptance of pottery into mainstream Western contemporary art. Having begun to work as an artist in South Africa, forty plus years ago, when European notions of high art and other cultural imperialist attitudes were being seriously questioned, the pot offered a format of universal appeal and a common human visual language.

Implicit in what I do is the questioning of the reality we create for ourselves and the questioning of Western notions of high art, and culture in general. In an increasingly global community I believe an understanding of the commonality of human experience and cultural development needs to be reinforced. I seek to explore the relationship between nature and culture; the relationship between what we make, why we make and the resources and process used to make, as an exploration to understand our existence.

These are two favourite books that reassure me that there is a tradition of sculptural figurative pots to be continued. The use of the earthy vessel that functions as an object to explore the human condition is universal across time and geography. From European Neolithic, to the Jarmon period in Japan, to the  pre-Columbian Americas and Africa. The second book, Smashing Pots by Nigel Barley and the BBC radio programs that he did in the early 1990’s, I remember as being some of the most interesting conversation around pots that I had heard. More and more I am of the opinion that the narrow conception of what a pot might be by Western European definitions of art and craft needs serious revision. Certainly with reference to pots of other cultures where they are often some of the most important sculptural objects that there are, Western cultural categorisations become irrelevant. I am not suggesting that all pots are necessarily sculptures, as not all man-made objects are sculptures, but I feel it is time to think what is sculpture and when should a pot be considered as sculpture.  

I grew up in a South African Game Reserve. The rhinoceros I am standing next to is not dead but drugged, ready for translocation as my father was involved in the early, Save the White Rhino campaign. This formative experience imprinted on me a world view based on Darwinian evolution and the importance of ecology in all natural systems and that we are still part of that system. While always interested in the sciences, I have followed a path in the arts. On the premise that us humans have evolved from that wilderness I experienced out there in Africa, in my artistic work I am fascinated by how this connection influences and moulds our aesthetic experience - the Biology of Beauty. Studies in evolutionary cognition place great emphasis on us as embodied creatures that interact with the environment, where the environment is physical, cultural and interpersonal. From these bodily sensations emerge all perception,  meaning,  value, thought, language and symbolic meaning. I feel too often we forget just how much we each still carry that wilderness inside of ourselves.