Simon Olding - Ceramic Review

There is a strand of work in contemporary craft (as well as in animation) in Britain that accentuates the eccentric through the use of figures: not quite satiric and not quite cartoon. The metal and found object sculptures of Mike Abbott and Ken Ellwood come to mind, as do the ceramics of Jane Muir and to some degree the symbolic work of John Maltby. Jenny Southam's ceramic sculptures occupy this same territory. her figures poised between a gentle reflective gravity and an approachable. quirky humour. They are figures with more than a smile on their faces.

THE SPED Southam's approach to her work is disarmingly honest. She sees herself as a maker who uses her studio in Exeter as the 'equivalent of a woman in a shed'. The abundance of garden imagery in her work suggests that the shed is a place of prolific endeavour rather than idle repose. There is creative rumination at work here. the sharpening of the garden shears that figure in a number of pieces. The theme of the garden as a place of tended. organic growth, of careful nurturing is an essential underpinning to her creativity. Southam feels that `gardening and growing is in my blood` and through this force of life and nature she finds the recourse to study 'the animus of people and things'.

This serious-minded approach is not allowed to weigh heavily on the ceramic output. Collectors of her work respond immediately to the gentle humour and occasional eccentricities of her figure and animal groupings: the nude man cutting a garden hedge; the woman on a stepladder clipping a poodle; poodles waiting for a close-cropped shearing; a moon bather painting her toenails; the aptly titled Man Leaning Against a Pillar Enjoying a Nice Cup of Tea. Southam has a lively interest in the eccentricities of topiary. a theme that often features in her work.

CLAY The figures come from a highly personal approach. and this informed the growing independence of her voice as a potter. She absorbed with respect the guidance of her tutors (she studied fine art and sculpture at Bristol Polytechnic, now the University of the West of England), which left her with a love of bronze sculpture. But she developed an ambition to foster work concentrating on the figure and the poignant narrative rather than the abstract and non-representational.

In finding clay as her preferred medium soon after moving from Bristol to Exeter, she revelled in its fluidity, ease of manipulation and its sense of eternity. Clay is a means to an end; and the end is the often miniature tableau; a figure group or a single figure work, where a heavily bodied, tiny-headed woman (and occasionally a man) is preoccupied in a mesmeric although sometimes prosaic task. They are lost in reverie, concentrating as much on dreaming as the job in hand: whether this is gardening, offering a bunch of flowers or studying a sculpture. Many of her scenes involve couples engaged in a humble task (making the bed; enjoying the prospect of a swim) or sharing a lovers' embrace, hidden behind a painted hedge.

The mix of the deliberatively 'naive' element (these nude figures have impossibly large torsos and impossibly small heads) and the moments of serenity in which they are engaged creates the gentle counterpoint that leads the sculptures away from the purely humorous, though this is often their point of departure. The mood of serene quiet and contemplation also enriches these tableaux, as do the sculptural references: her horses recall bronzes by the Italian expressionist sculptor Marino Marini and many of her female figures, especially those in their bucolic repose. are reminiscent of the organic. fluid and yet stately curves of the monumental sculpture of Henry Moore. Not all ' references are so serious. Southam ls an admirer of 1950s English tableware, while the poodles that appear regularly in her tableaux might have sprung straight from the imagery of such plates; they are modelled with a clear affection for the joie de vivre of the post- war style.

SCALE Currently Southam is concentrating more on smaller scale figure and animal groupings. Some of her earliest work (in tin-glazed earthenware) was considerably larger in scale, with generous areas of terracotta clay left untouched and contrasting with freely applied painted finishes.
More characteristically she now applies occasional streaks or dabs of colour to a cream slip surface, letting its vibrancy sing out and aiding the more immediate and intimate character of the piece. She says that she uses oxide colour 'in an intuitive way to echo the world's internal rhythm'. These are idiosyncratic personalities, found in introspective moments, lost in thought or in a rather stately manner of a formal presentation. The embracing arms of her female figures, deliberately out of scale with the petite heads, reflect involvement, generosity and warmth. This is the work of a compassionate artist.

Human oddity fascinates Southam. 'We recall eccentricity before we remember normality; that's what makes us who we are.' Her ceramic sculptures enliven situations that are against the tide as she responds to the theatricality and energy of the circus with acrobats that have spectacular musculatures; another series focuses on abstracted, perky birds. But capturing the moment of stillness and repose is also important to the reflective streak that runs deep in her make-up, of figures caught in repose: one woman (perhaps based on her own mother) quietly watches a cactus grow, peacefully letting time slip quietly by.

CURRENTLY Jenny Southam is investigating a different approach, modelling a series of much more intensely coloured objects, sculptural organic forms that look like, in her adroit phrase, 'a cactus sputnik'. These are strange objects: things from the deep, the subconscious, or perhaps from the moon. They rest on a studio shelf at the moment, representing, as do her figures, the diversity of the slightly estranged.

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