Martin Counsell

Each year Craftsman Magazine sponsors the Student Award at Art in Clay, where graduates from several art colleges and universities display their work alongside that of long established potters, some of whom have actually been their course tutors. For the student award we look for originality, craftsmanship and skill in the making, a marketable product which will help the maker find a place in the modern day ceramics market.

Often we select the work of a young new maker, eager to build a business with their work, hoping to create a successful career with their skills. At the 2004 event, however, we selected the interesting and striking work of Martin Counsell, a mature student from Harrow, University of Westminster. Unlike some of the younger makers who are just setting off on their journey with ceramics, Martin has been able to look back on his life experiences, analyse and reflect on them and echo his thoughts and feelings in the work which won him the award.

Briefly, as a child, Martin moved to Bermuda with his family in the late 1950s, later trained as a veterinarian in Canada and was in practice in Toronto for a year before returning to do a post graduate year in 1982-3. He subsequently owned his own veterinary practice in Bermuda until 1997, afterwards spending several years travelling and sailing before taking up his BA Ceramics at Harrow.

Martin's work is unusual and there will undoubtedly be a keen interest in it from interior designers and for commissions. Martin's own words best describe why he chooses to make what he does, the thoughts and reasonings behind his work, how it has evolved, where it has come from and where it is going. Reading his words, it seems that the creation of these pieces has been an entirely personal experience, a reflection and then a moving on, rather than a means of earning a living, that aspect of his work seems to be almost incidental to Martin.

Read his words and then perhaps read them again, grasp what he's saying and you may come to understand what it was that inspired him to work with clay in the way that he does.

"Developing and making pieces is a means for me to consider my experiences. In a way they are tools with which to examine ideas and emotions, thoughts and images. They are, in addition to being a means of expression, a means of reflection, 'a way for the soul to find its own infinity within the limits of some finite thing'.

I went to Harrow with few expectations, with the hope of developing an understanding of function and expression as a ceramicist and to explore the visual arts in general. It was a continuation of the changes that were taking place in my life.

My veterinary practice had been sold and my professional career suspended in favour of a long held sailing dream. I had been travelling across continents and across oceans for four years, finding passion and fear, love and loss, exhilaration and death. In many ways it was a sanctuary.

Much of my visual memory is rooted in organic and inorganic natural forms and objects. I feel that the essence of what I make has to reflect those parts of my experience that are central to it. There is an enormously strong affinity for strata and laminates, they represent processes that root me to a non-urban environment. Cycles of growth and change that are represented by patterns in rock, at one end of the time scale, and plants at the other, provide rich metaphoric associations with human experience. They represent a material manifestation of presence and absence, appearance and disappearance, an accretion of quotidian perceptions that layer and fold themselves, interwoven into a framework of constancy that is probed and rent by circumstance. Thickness of moments, stretched out, coalescing into strands of time, the delicate skin of containment. The sense of 'elsewhere', of impermanence and chance, of contingency, of our human place in this material world, these are the themes I explore, and in doing so, developed a visual language that allowed me to reflect on them.

The greatest awareness of myself as 'body in the world',

(a term used by the French philosopher Merleau-Ponty with regard to his writing on phenomenology), has been in extremely isolated regions - mountains, deserts and ocean - and it is from here that my core references, which are both visual and experiential, are the most profound. Being storm-tossed on an ocean brings a unique awareness of multiple sensory inputs: kinaesthetic, auditory, visual, tactile, olfactory... even taste (salty). These are some of my touchstones for discernment and, as much as I am capable, it is these places that have enabled me to sense the 'whole weave of myself with the world'.

With the elements of perception, time, memory, structure and absence in mind, I wanted to develop the space of the interior in terms of remnant and not in the more familiar ceramic form - as vessel. Vessels are associated with containment, but the difficulty was how to explore unseen interiors through an opaque material. It seemed that one way to do so was to disrupt the surface in such a way that confusion was created between what constituted the boundary between inside and outside, between surface and substrate.

The other main quality that I thought important was the degree to which some pieces were fragile. This allowed a development of ideas that was richer and more varied while maintaining a sense of thematic cohesion: fragility and solidity, facade and core, veneer and substrate all became stronger considerations. I considered the importance of the material used in the making of objects and found it appealing that cardboard, that ubiquitous provider of containment, would act as scaffold for clay, rendered formless in its slip state, and become preserved in its absence by a transference and transformation of properties. The firing event, the process, would consummate this entanglement.

However, it remained imperative to my thinking at the time, to introduce some kind of human dimension. This was due in part to the ongoing interest in phenomenology and also as a means of activating these other thematic considerations. 'The space we see is a realm in which we ourselves, as viewers, are situated, not something we look out at or into'. This does not in any way infer particular attributes are needed by an object for them to be appreciated in phenomenological terms. It is the mode of viewing that is critical. And yet clearly some sculptural objects encourage such a mode of viewing more than others. If 'seeing integrates within itself the kinaesthetic and tactile dimensions of experience', then objects that encourage movement and touch, and that promote a sense of sharing their space, are going to be more successful. Additionally, I hoped a human element would allow a more convincing association with issues of fragility and impermanence which is to my mind at the forefront of issues relating to the individual and society and to the individual in the world.

I directed the 'individual in society' theme towards a discourse on made objects particularly as they are valued and consumed. I was concerned with the reading of objects, my role in making objects, the industry of objects - their production and consumption - especially as it relates to art objects and their commodity status; their value, preciousness, acquisition, ownership; and the role of quality, skill and work that is inherent in the making. It is consumption, in a general Malthusian sense, that I am particularly focused on, and I cannot legitimately distinguish what I make from other commodities. By promoting the challenge and the burden of ownership I was hoping to question the motives for acquisition. The debate becomes richer when concepts of permanence are directly linked to cultural artefacts and their sufficiency and autonomy. Preciousness and value placed, rather than in conjunction with, in opposition to material and work. Sculptural work cannot successfully avoid the questioning of material.

Clay/ceramic material has a metaphoric legitimacy and added resonance in the questioning of our search for permanence in a world where destruction and impermanence are the norm, 'renouncing the hypocritical eternity of art'.

The 'individual in the world' issue was looked at from several points of view - that of attempting to understand a phenomenological approach to perception and how that impacts on the making and viewing of objects and the reintegration of the human animal into the natural world. By that I am referring primarily to an emphasis on contingency. '... the removal of a deity from the world leaves us with the sheer fact of the existence of things, sheer contingency'.

The contingency I want internal to the work, part of the process of making that creates a framework in which indeterminacy is a key component and in such a way that it cannot be interfered with, the outcome manipulated beyond the setting out. The evidence of the hand is seen to lose its primacy, its control, during the firing process.

The surface qualities of earlier work presented me with questions concerning how closely I wanted the work to be viewed in a representational manner with references to such things as geology. Duchamp states that 'the creative act is not performed by the artist alone; the spectator brings the work in contact with the external world by deciphering and interpreting its inner qualifications and thus adds his contribution to the creative act'.

I came to recognise something of Susan Hillier's comment that 'art functions to reveal what we don't know that we know'. Similarly, Potts suggests... 'Precisely by focusing our attention on the actual material and visual properties of its surfaces and its literal occupancy of space as distinct from what it might represent as an image, a sculpture often does activate a mode of viewing that puts into abeyance a straightforward recognition of it as the inert object... it literally is'. It can accede to its non-logical self.

When asked whether to 'understand something' or 'just look' Donald Judd replied... "That's the division between thought and feeling. In looking you understand; it's more than you can describe. You look and think, and look and think, until it makes sense, becomes interesting."

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This article first appeared in Issue 162
of Craftsman Magazine

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