1887-1954White earthenware with terra sigillata, cobalt sulfate, cobalt underglaze and clear glaze
A few blogs ago I mentioned that I was working on a review
of Michael Flaherty's exhibition at the Craft Council Gallery for C
magazine. While I was working on
it I was surprised to discover how many folks here in St. John's were
unfamiliar with the publication.
In my opinion, it is Canada's best publication in terms of critical
writing about art and it certainly deserves our attention.
Here's a link to their website if you'd like to check it
out:
Anyhow, with the editors' permission I am sharing the text
of my review, which appears in C magazine's current Summer 2012 issue.
My favourite image of Mike as a Grey Island settler.
Michael Flaherty: Rangifer Sapiens
Craft Council Gallery, St. John’s, NL
February 4 – March 11, 2012
Artist Michael Flaherty describes
himself as a “conceptual ceramicist” and occasionally as a “ceramic
fundamentalist.” Both self- identifications distinguish his studio practice
from functional pottery and highlight the fact that Flaherty is part of a new
generation of craft practitioners who are as interested in ideas as they are in
materials or objects. Leading craft theorist Glenn Adamson characterizes this
generation of makers as “post-disciplinary” because they work across
disciplines normally distinguished by
a medium such as ceramics. This is a
radical departure in the evolution of studio craft practice. Among his
post-disciplinary peers, Flaherty stands out as “ceramic fundamentalist.” He is
engaged with ceramics but maintains a critical distance from it.
When Flaherty embarked on a self-imposed
exile on one of the abandoned Grey Islands off the north coast of Newfoundland
in 2009, he captured the public’s imagination. Why would a young, thirty
something artist leave the comfort of his studio and community in downtown St.
John’s for the isolation of a remote island? Ostensibly, the three-month
project was a self-styled artist residency wherein he set out to “create and
document a location specific art piece.” In his presentations before and after
the event, Flaherty explained that he was there to build an inside-out kiln. It
was a conceptual art event where he would symbolically “fire the island.” In
his blog-commentary about the Grey Islands, Flaherty shows himself, the urban
potter, decked out in buckskin jacket and coonskin cap, like a campy 2009 version
of “a settler.” The title of the resulting show, Rangifer Sapiens translates
from scientific Latin as “wise caribou” and it features haunting ceramic
sculptures. They are milk-white, life-sized antlers that grow with organic
grace from broken pottery—cups, plates and teapots, usually left with a loop of
functional handle. Each “shard” is blushed with rust tones and it appears that
the decoration of decal or hand-painted motif has migrated from vessel to
antler, leaving its imprint. The fascinating result is a rich, ambiguous hybrid
object of human and animal, like a mythological creature that simultaneously
taps into two interconnected worlds. All of the sculptures in the show are
titled by numbers—birth and death dates—found on gravestones in French Cove.
These titles hint at the personal and encourage the interpretation of the works
as portraits.
Effectively, Flaherty’s invention of
antler-shards is a timeline of the habitation of the Grey Islands. From the
1500s onwards, cod, herring and seals attracted French fishermen and ultimately
English and Irish settlers to these remote islands. However, by the 1960s, the
population of the islands had shrunk from about 200 to 86 souls.
They were resettled to White Bay, which
was deemed more easily administered by the provincial government. In the early
70s, a herd of caribou was introduced to the Grey Islands by the Department of
Wildlife to save them from extinction due to overhunting by the non-Aboriginal
population, who least needed the caribou for subsistence. During his three
months on the Grey Islands, Flaherty repeatedly found shed antlers from the
living herd and the archaeological remains of the place’s human past. The
implications were not lost on him.
Flaherty’s response to the historical
narrative of the Grey Islands’ habitation is especially interesting because of
the artist’s age and perspective. He is a generation removed from the
hot-button topic of resettlement in the province, and two generations removed
from Newfoundland joining Confederation. There are many layers to his
complicated and intelligent response. On one hand, Flaherty’s vantage point
gives him a sobering perspective that his father and grandfather’s generation
could not easily enjoy. The questions of whether Newfoundland should join
Confederation (and Canada) and whether the government had the right to resettle
its rural population were topics of fiery debate, which for decades dominated
the province’s cultural identity and threatened to divide families.
Resettlement, for exam- ple, was widely regarded as the deathblow to the
traditional outport lifestyle that today is the staple icon of the province’s
tourism ads.
Flaherty has noticeably avoided the term
of “resettlement” in his media inter- views and artist statement. His art points
out the human-centric weakness of earlier dialogues on this topic. Succinctly
put, it says: where human civilization stops, nature flourishes. It is a subtle
wake-up call to a province that has only in the past two years introduced a
curbside recycling program in its capital city. In other provinces, it is
likely that this body of Flaherty’s work will be seen in terms of colonialism
and relevant to a discussion of the residential schools and forced resettlement
of Aboriginal youth.
Flaherty’s ability to draw a “connection
between past and present, human and animal, presence and absence,” as he sets
out in his show statement, is impressive. Flaherty’s ceramic sculptures have a
sur- prising, nuanced wholeness, both visually and metaphorically. The fusion of
antler and cup assumes a visual logic; they are not awkward or jarring. He is
able to communicate that the shed antler, which is scientifically classed as
“true bone,” emerging from the skull of the animal is metaphorically equivalent
to the shard or “true bone” of the human. The “shard” portions of the
sculptures are thrown on a potter’s wheel and then cut with careful precision.
They are not broken or damaged. The
“shards” are fragments worn smooth with time and the elements. The language of
European settler ceramics and successive contemporary counterparts are
documented on the antler portions not as interrupted pattern but in continuous
passages that wind around its front and back.
Flaherty’s sculptures function in the
manner of a quoted line of poetry: they are sections but are not broken. In
fact, some of the decorations are miniature landscapes, which Flaherty has said
are of imagined places. The silhouettes of cobalt blue waves or rolling hills
echo the profile of the antler’s tines. It is a subtle act of reciprocation.
Gloria Hickey is an independent curator and writer living in St.
John’s, NL. Her most recent touring exhibition is The Fabric of Clay: Alexandra
McCurdy.
First published in C
Magazine issue 114 (Summer 2012)
Mike with an installation of his antler shards.
