A conversation between Cecile Johnson Soliz and Phyllida Barlow
Introduction from Steffan Jones-Hughes 29/6/2019
Transcribed and elaborated, August 2019

Katie Allen
Bermingham & Robinson
Michael Cousin
Sean Edwards
Paul Emmanuel
Carwyn Evans
Peter Finnemore
Dafydd Fortt
Andy Fung
S. Mark Gubb
David Hastie
Richard Higlett
Cecile Johnson Soliz
Naomi Leake
Elfyn Lewis
Heather and Ivan Morison
David Nash
Magali Nourgarede
Chris Nurse
Helen Sear
Miranda Whall
Sue Williams
Bedwyr Williams
Craig Wood

Pop Art reprints the ‘ Fixtures and Fittings’ essay from the partner exhibition catalogue, ‘Objects for the Ideal Home: the Legacy of Pop Art : Serpentine Gallery, London, 11 September-20 October 1991. This and the Pop Art exhibition at the Royal Academy ran simultaneously.

Excerpt:
“The Title of the Serpentine exhibition running concurrently with the Royal Academy Pop Art Show, Objects for the Ideal Home, refers to Richard Hamilton’s early Pop piece, Just what is it that makes today’s’ homes so different, so appealing? Visually, this provides a summary of Pop art’s fascination with consumerism, advertising and mass-production, sex and banality. The Serpentine Show aimed to explore the continuing influence of the Pop movement on contemporary artists today and the similar concern with works based on the familiar and the domestic which are transformed into icons of everyday living. The metaphor of the department store was chosen to define the Serpentine’s spaces each room being given a title that alludes to the objects for sale: Fixtures and Fittings; Home Improvements; Originals and Replicas; Objets d’Art; Sign Systems. Brought together were 30 works by American and European artists of great stylistic diversity ranging from the modifications of fabricated objects by Rosemarie Trockel and Bertrand Lavier, the pristine sculpture of Julian Opie with their machine-like finish to the hilarity of Jeff Koons’ Winter Bears.”

This essay reprints, ‘Fixtures and Fittings’ from the Serpentine Catalogue featuring artists: Richard Artswager, Robert Gober, Cecile Johnson Soliz, Michael Craig-Martin, Grenville Davey, Allan McCollum, Cady Noland, Julian Opie and Ed Allington.

Essays:
Modern Art at the Bowes Museum, Elizabeth Conran, Director, The Bowes Museum
The Collector, Veit Gorner
The Curator, Penelope Curtis

Artists:
Eric Bainbridge
Stephen Balkenhol
Rudolf Bumiller
Laura Ford
Gunther Forg
Katarina Fritsch
Anya Gallacio
Pamela Golden
Asta Groting
Andreas Gursky
Thomas Grunfeld
Georg Herold
Damien Hirst
Martin Hoert
Bethan Huws
Cecile Johnson
Thomas Locher
Klaus Merkel
Wilhelm Mundt
Avis Newman
Mariele Neudecker
Reno Patarica
Jacqui Pncelet
Emma Rushton
Gundula Schulze el Dowy
Thomas Schutte
Wiebke Siem
Wolfgang Tilmans
Gavin Turk
Gillian Wearing
Richard Wentworth
Hermione Wiltshire
Daphne Wright
Catherine Yass
Peter Zimmermann

Articles
Editorial Introduction: Tools of the Trades, Jon Wood
Silence and Tools: Non(verbalizing) Sculptor’s Practice, Jyrki Siukonen
The Tortoise and the Hare: Extempore Performance and Sculptural Practice in Eighteenth-century France, Tomas Macsotay
Plastic Pleasures: Reconsidering the Practice of Modeling through Manuals of Sculpture Technique, c.1880-1933, Ann Compton
Constantin Brancusi and the Image of Trade: Aspects of Trade in the Realm of Modern Fine Arts, Nina Gulicher
Statement of Practice
Maxwell’s Silver Hammer, Edward Allington
Clay, Tools and Tooling, Cecile Johnson Soliz
New Territories in the Round, Krysten Cunningham and Jon Wood

See also: Clay, Tools and Tooling

Exhibition invitation and document.

Art Ambulance calls attention to the unacknowledged energy and activities of those that enable the making and celebrating of art. People are nominated; their badge is made and sent to them by post. With it they receive a nomination form in case they’d like to nominate someone else. Anyone can nominate someone for an Art Ambulance badge. There are currently over 100 people in the Europe and the USA with badges.

I was struck during my job writing biographies for a Dictionary of Art years ago how most artists are inspired and enabled by somebody when they are young: a quirky uncle or neighbor, a teacher or their Mum. This partly inspired this project. People tell me their badges lead them to have unusual conversations. The project is self-perpetuating.

In a huge upstairs floor the size of an aircraft hanger, Red Bank Manufacturing Company welcomed me to work alongside the clay workers of the Specials’ Department for 14 months. I was given a workbench, a metal bucket and unlimited clay. There were 400 men and two women at Red Bank, including me. On my first day I asked for some clay: A pallet load arrived. During my stay there, I designed and made over 100 chimney pot sculptures, some of which are seen on the catalogue-come-invitation card. Anyone could order from it.

The experience of working alongside the clay workers at Red Bank challenged many of my ideas about being an artist: innovation in relation to tradition, the original artwork in relation to the manufactured, an artwork compared to design or craft object and working as an individual compared to working in a team all came up during the course of my stay. Propped on our workbenches during a tea break, filling a mold or making a series of pots, we talked endlessly about theses things from our different points of view. We always came back to our shared interests in two things: one was how words can sometimes be misleading or not really do the job well enough and the other was in tools, which led me to write, ‘Clay, tools & tooling’.

In the Specials Department it became clear to us that words could be limiting and sometimes not able to define or name a person, process or object in a full sense. For example, were clay workers to be called workers, craftsmen, specialists or clay worker? What was I? An artist? An artist making chimney pots….that didn’t seem to add up! And what then was I making? A sculpture or a chimney pot art or design or craft? In the end, the name Chimney Pot Sculpture or CPS, emerged, the clay workers decided they would be called clay workers and that no matter how many chimney pots I made, I was an artist.

Some of the Chimney Pot Sculptures can be seen on buildings in Cardiff such as CPS23s on Mill Lane in the city centre or CPS20s on houses in Pomeroy Street and Clarence Embankment. In the summer of 2000 they could be seen in Cardiff’s Central Market, at the Cardiff Bay Art Trust and at the National Museum & Galleries of Wales. In 2000, Red Bank Manufacturers received a ‘Commendation for Business Sponsorship of the Arts’ for their sponsorship of the Skyline project. The Cardiff Bay Art Trust invited me to make a public artwork and were joint sponsors of ‘Skyline’.

‘Regarding the Function of Objects: Recent Sculpture by Cecile Johnson Soliz’, Introduction by Juliet Carey 1999

Excerpt:

‘Cecile Johnson Soliz’s sculptures are as familiar as they are strange. Their impact derives partly from the subtle beauty of their outlines, partly from the pallor and luminosity of their ceramic surfaces and partly from their extraordinary sense of presence. The sculptures are based on everyday objects and, with their rhythms of shapes and intervening spaces, have an austerity and integrity reminiscent of still lifes by Chardin and Morandi. Like unpainted marble or bisquit porcelain, the lack of colour and uniform texture in each work is infinitely suggestive. Each sculpture is at once ‘the thing itself’ and a representation of absent objects.

Cecile Johnson Soliz’s work confronts the conventional divisions between ‘fine’ and ‘applied’ art, between art and craft traditions and between the unique and the mass-produced. The forms of her lustrous and monumental sculptures are based on familiar and functional objects found in marketplaces, museums and peoples homes, some viewed first hand and others gleaned from photographs and illustrations. Vases, pitchers and beakers, separated by geography and time, are stripped of their specificity. Finished works of art, but incomplete in comparison with their functional counterparts, these sculptures tantalize the viewer with clues about their creation, materials and function. She draws on cultures as diverse of those of Ghana and Bolivia and has recently been inspired by objects in the collections of the National Museum and Galleries of Wales, from twentieth century ceramics to fragments of Bronze Age beakers.’

Excerpt from Introduction:
By Nigel Prince and Gavin Wade

“What does it mean to stand still in a quiet place and reflect on how we got there and where this could lead to? We found ourselves in such a place at a moment of potential: the end of a century seemed an appropriate moment to examine notions of idealized communities and the utopian philosophies that underpin them. As a prime example of a ‘model’ village, Bournville provided us with an ideal location, enabling artist and architects to respond to the site or present work with a particular resonance. Bournville was special, a place where questions could be asked and an answer might be heard.”

Essays:
Travelling to Utopia, Jeremy Akerman
Diary (for the music makers and the dreamers of dreams), Simon Morrissey
Utopia and Negation, David Beech
Thoughts while walking in a lane…, Mark Pimlott
Urban, Suburban, Wendy Shillam
Remembering Bournville, Catherine Nash

Artists:
Atopos
Arakawa and Gins
Harty + Harty
James Hyde
Mike Metz
Julian Opie
Andrea Zittel & Sebastian Clough
Lawerence Weiner
Jacqueline Donachie
Jim Isermann
Darren Lago
Lucy Orta
Kathrin Bohn
Liam Gillick
Ian Hamilton Finlay
Cecile Johnson Soliz
Maurizio Nannuci
Atelier van Lieshout
Gary Perkins
Nina Saunders
Keith Wilson
Yinka Shonibare
Martin Boyce
Dan Grahan
Kevin Harley
Nathan Coley
Cornford & Cross
Richard Wright