Bone China rituals. Predictions of the future arising from fire, history and ashes
By Kamilė Pirštelytė, art critic
Human life is full of transitory transformations initiated by rituals. Often they are uncomfortable, anxious, marked by a lack of confidence, fear of new territory, whether it is a birthday or a funeral, a new start in independent life when separated from parents or grown children, the symbolic sitting on a chair when leaving home before a long journey, or throwing a coin into the ocean in order to to return to newly discovered places that led to inner change. All transformations, no matter how the word has been worn down by popular culture, lead to new knowledge, an improvement that is difficult to speculate on, no matter how confident we feel in justifying the axioms of probability.
Rituals, invented individually or becoming a collective status quo, also exist at the professional level, entering a less familiar territory. By organizing biennials, triennials, interdisciplinary fairs, by introducing new projects, creative laboratories, unexpected combinations of curators or artists to the cultural market, by setting goals, “deadlines”, beginning and end celebrations, we gradually influence the historical changes of our time, which reveal itself only from a certain time.
It’s no secret that the field of Lithuanian ceramics has experienced a certain rise in the last decade. Our artists are becoming better recognized in the general Lithuanian society and in the international context, and this interest is growing not only thanks to the increasing offer of exhibitions, healthy competition between authors, but also the formation of ceramics curatorship, its diversity, continuity, and elaboration. Ritualism.
The origins of professional Lithuanian ceramics are closely related to Kaunas. It formed the first basics and culture of porcelain, the most expensive material in the field, which dominated Lithuania for almost the entire last century. The International Bone China Symposium, presented this year as part of the “Kaunas 2022 – European Capital of Culture” program and held for the 21st time, is a good example of how specific processes of contemporary art can be promoted through regional tradition, consistency and worldly thinking. This year, nine artists were invited to the symposium to reflect on the theme of industrial heritage for the exhibition Porcelain City – Sabrina Basten (Germany), Monika Patuszynska (Poland), Alison Safford (USA), Janina Myronova (Poland/Ukraine), Jurgita Jasinskaitė (Lithuania), Ming -Miao Ko (Belgium), Jānis Kupčs (Latvia), Viktória Maróti (Hungary), Liudas Parulskis (Lithuania). All these authors, characterized by experimental, interdisciplinary expression, had not only to learn to work with bone china, but also to get to know the context of Kaunas, to establish their creativity.
In this culturally important year for Kaunas, the symposium presents the exhibition Porcelain City. Being displayed on Laisvės alley, in the former post office located in the interwar modernist building, the exhibition symbolically builds a bridge between the regional history of bone china and the modern, multicultural, interdisciplinary society. The authors of the exhibition – most of whom came to Lithuania from different countries and only a few directly graduated from ceramics studies – using the complexity of bone china material revealed how diverse artistic and ideological expression can be. Also, how important and interesting it is to invite artists of different generations and disciplines to one exhibition, because only when you stop segmenting them by exhibitions, fairs, applied and visual art categories, new opportunities arise for discovering contemporary art and all its types, and maybe even inventing new technologies, evolving individually. We need to expand our closed regional field through new, “from aside” initiated experiments, which shape the perception of the public, curators and artists themselves, what is the real panorama of the Lithuanian and world art field.
The world is complex and full of paradoxes. No matter how hard we sometimes try to deny it, to emphasize our independence from the environment: nations, people, animals, nature synergize, mix with each other, hybridize. For thousands of years, different cultures have been fighting each other for dominance, but it is our differences that become the main driving force for travel, the search for inspiration, and new discoveries. Bigger states, trying to usurp smaller nations and enable only one narrative, eventually begin to appropriate the uniqueness of smaller nations, to sell it for economic purposes. Cities, which initially wanted to maintain their regional purity, sooner or later introduce new technologies, architectural styles, and artistic currents from other countries, helping to strengthen or expand their authenticity. We have a lot of coded and renewable information flowing through our blood, and identity can be very binary, consisting of many variables. People are conditioned by the environment, its history and the changes, confrontations, and mutations that are constantly taking place in the present, and what significance these processes will have as a whole is very interesting to speculate, but the true reality will emerge only from a longer distance of time.
These aspects in the exhibition Porcelain City seem to become the dominant axis of all hybrid, artistic and technological experiments, responding to reflections on the legacy of Kaunas Jiesia‘s porcelain, the uniqueness of the city’s architecture, the contemporary context of art and the world, and the dramatic philosophising of bone china itself. The specificity of the material results in a more sensitive approach to the material by artists, as even 60% of bone china consists of cattle bone ash. Taken from meat factories due to their composition of fire-resistant kaolin, sand, calcium, feldspar, they give ceramics a paradox: the porcelain work, being exceptionally thin and appearing fragile and graceful due to the pearly translucency, actually has a special strength suitable for industrial production.
This factor excited the Polish-Ukrainian artist Janina Myronova, who created sculptures of cows and bulls in black and white, combining drawing and form. The works, without knowing the context, exude playfulness, Far Eastern aesthetics and the resulting sacred associations. However the pun name “Cownas” becomes a reference to both the city and the history of bone china. Liudas Parulskis, a well-known photo-video artist and designer in Lithuania, gave a grotesque dedication to the context of animals with his works, adding chicken fingers to the classic and graceful Jiesia‘s tableware Subordination, talking about the circle of consumption in the kiosk cycle Expectations and Other Goods. Jurgita Jasinskaitė, who likes to create associative, transformative ceramics that play with changing visual meanings in the viewer’s imagination, presented a sculptural installation about the city of the dead for the Porcelain City exhibition. The gentle forms of spheress and cemetery rakes, with their archetypal and Japanese minimalism, take you to the mystical world of spirits, which, combined with the openwork of Kaunas balconies and cemetery fences, make a viewer to guess whose death – people, animals or traditions – was the most important for the author in this exhibition. Another prominent author in the Baltic States, Jānis Kupčs, who is characterized by a conceptual and comic look at the ceramic media and the world, reveals these features in the sculptural composition of deformed bone china dolls “Et in Arcadia ego”. In it, the title of the baroque Poussin painting acquires new paraphrasic meanings, ironizing the duality of modernity, the idealistic image of society and the absurdity of ignoring the theme of death.
A sensitive approach to the theme of being and its transformations was also revealed in the composition of the works From a series of memories of the Polish ceramist Monika Patuszynska who modifies and constructs different pieces of porcelain into one sculptural form, trying to respond to the fragmentation of human memory, her relationship with her new environment – Kaunas, bone china, history. Impressive transformations of contemporary ceramics, combining technological experiments with the importance of conceptual ideas, are also revealed in the works of other foreign creators. The works of Ming Miao Ko, a Taiwanese woman living in Belgium, In Veins are related to a scientific, jewelry and poetic look directed at the fluidity and adaptability of life, the blurring of boundaries in the world around us. Being fragile and powerful, no matter in what form (human, animal, plant, thing) it is, therefore, according to the author, it must be nurtured with care, including the bone china itself. The young Hungarian author Viktória Maróti, inspired by the architectural elements of the Old Town of Kaunas, created the objects Fragments, in which, alongside conceptual, interdisciplinary thinking, the importance of the ceramicist as a chemist and technologist becomes apparent. The ceramic and textile experiments characteristic of the author reach such hybridities that with their sensuous illusions and synchronization of small elements, it is surprising that these are not 3D printer works, but handwork.
However this and other modern technologies, combined with interdisciplinary experiments, are important to the American artist Alison Safford. The great-grandparents of the author of German origin lived in Lithuania, so combining the knowledge of different disciplines, the artist pays a lot of attention to the placement of art, the context of the city of Kaunas. After conducting artistic research focused on Lithuania and family history, the post-industrial environment, Safford created the birch installation Floating World. Through ceramics, sound, video, light and space, the audience is drawn into the multifaceted reflections of the city, country, family, and ecology. Meanwhile, another installation creator, Sabrina Basten from Germany, presented ready-made works Warriors at the central Kaunas post office. Increasingly, the artist working in the field of contemporary ceramics collected unnecessary Jiesia porcelain items from the public and melted them down to apply them to her sculptures. Their hybridity, the illustrative nature of the drawings lures viewers into the contemplation of the complex human being, the life of a woman.
The community of artists, especially ceramicists, is quite closed. This specificity, as well as the lack of specialists popularizing ceramics in independent Lithuania for some time, caused the poor attitude of society itself to a very interesting and naturally interdisciplinary field. It is obvious that the curators of the symposium contribute to a more versatile and high-quality disclosure of the field of contemporary ceramics to the public by inviting creators not only from our region, but also from other countries, outlining the rules for applying the complex bone porcelain technology to the selected theme, highlighting the importance of the artistic idea… Local authors are encouraged to leave their comfortable, and sometimes stagnant, thematic genre, technological scope; to cooperate with artists from other fields, while gradually forming a more open, bolder, experimental Lithuanian contemporary ceramics market, capable of identifying itself in the context of global art processes and acting on these processes.
The world is a paradoxical place. Rituals and traditions are able to survive by inspiring new phenomena. The tradition of bone china porcelain developed in Kaunas is surprising. The limitation of the complex technology only stops at the beginning, because the variety of works created during the symposiums reveals the wide possibilities of ceramics in the context of contemporary art, its democracy and adaptability in the work of artists of various fields. Little by little, the tradition is being revived through the synergy of different peoples, the experience and worldviews of the creators form a dynamic space-time of art. Contemporary art allows us to look at history, the present and future perspectives not only through the author’s personal relationship, but also through a broader, problematic discourse, often provoking and engaging the audience first with an intellectual experience, and only then with an emotional one. Ceramics combines the applicability of archaic and complex old and new technologies, natural interdisciplinarity, as well as the ability to adapt to the changing environment and even tell its history from under the deep layers of the earth, the wrinkles of the face of the ancient city… makes you pause and speculate. What future, rising from the ashes and cinders of the fire, awaits this area? So far, it looks promising.