Ceramics Crossing Boundaries

TAMSIN VAN ESSEN

Tamsin Van Essen’s work takes ceramics beyond the studio or gallery and into a physical commentary on contemporary socio-cultural phenomena. In this paper, she discusses cross-disciplinary aspects of ceramic practice and technique, examining projects at the threshold of art and science, exploring aesthetic ambiguity and questioning current obsessions with perfection and beauty. Her work comments on social behaviour and issues that permeate modern society – health, stigma, education, and the public perception of science and medicine. Within this conceptual framework, she emphasises the importance of material experimentation and how this sits within the wider context of ceramic tradition. The projects she introduces all have a particular focus on medical science, examining our relationship as humans with medicine, issues arising from our attitudes and prejudices, and how technology has shaped our approach to medical diagnosis, tools and our identities as material beings.

The first project, Medical Heirlooms, explores attitudes to disease and how we can simultaneously be fascinated and repulsed by certain medical conditions. A set of ceramic apothecary jars display symptoms of hereditary medical conditions, becoming containers for disease. As family heirlooms, the jars can be passed down through the generations in the same way as the hereditary conditions: a legacy of ill-health.

The second, The Anatomy of Transformations, is a residency and research collaboration with Dr Richard Wingate, Head of Anatomy at King’s College London. Based in the specimen museum and anatomical research laboratories, the project uses ceramics as a vehicle to investigate how anatomy can be understood as a series of transformations, focusing on the different layers of material, developmental and dimensional processes involved. This leads on to the development of a series of workshops now included in the curriculum for medical students at Imperial College London, using clay to improve tactile observation skills, communication and enhance the students’ ability to translate between the digital and the physical. The workshops highlight the value of ‘hands-on’ practice and that along with the cutting edge technological advances in medical science, one must not underplay the importance of our most basic technology – the interaction of human hand and tool.

The third project is a continuing collaboration between designers and historians, Making Enhanced, committed to finding a new way of working. Launched in a ‘shed of wonder’ within the Saatchi Gallery in London, this project breaks down boundaries across disciplines to produce work that introduces new audiences to alternative, critically-informed ways of experiencing their environment. The research digs into ritual use of tools, and how the materiality and performative aspects of objects can be used to define status and image.

To conclude, Tamsin discusses material ambiguity and subversion of the familiar, through introducing a series of ceramic tools exploring ancient Indian medical technology. She argues that the craft and material qualities of ceramics can provide a language for communication, presenting an investigation into the critical and metaphorical possibilities of ceramics as a three-dimensional medium for interpreting abstract ideas.