‘The Property of a Lady’ 2002 is on show.  It consists of 24 sections, 4 across and 6 high, with an extensive white clay dinner service arranged within each of the bottle-green compartments, appearing very orderly. Each section seems to be arranged symmetrically, with its contents lined up on either side of the axis.

The title makes me think of the auction house, but I can equally easily believe that I am below stairs in a stately home, with the china arranged carefully but artlessly, for simple ease of access.  One might well think of these pieces as having come to rest after being at work. They might have been used a century or two ago, or just last night.

It is a strange business looking at Cecile Johnson Soliz’s work, because you don’t quite know what you are looking at. ‘Property of a Lady’ offers you various options: to look at individual pieces, to look at the arrangement of a group of pieces in each section, or to look at the overall composition.  You can let it go in and out of focus, allowing it to be more or less like a picture.

There is an overall symmetry to the tableau as a whole which I begin to mark off, box by box. The top left and top right sections both slope inwards, as if providing the whole with a pediment.  The same cutting of the corners appears again on the bottom row.

But then I begin to question the order.  How is it ordered?  Its neat and systematic impression begins to admit of occasional lapses. One section is ‘missing’ a cup, another a ladle, a third a box.  One consists only of irregular items, another is irregularly placed. Should I read anything into this?

Hallucinate a little more, and project some imagery onto these conveniently blank frames.  I play with a little Chinoiserie, some Sevres, some Meissen. Which country?  What decoration fits what form?  And how vulnerable is the form – or the function – without its decoration? For instance, am I looking at vases or at a condiment set?  Would I be right to see it as Chinese? Are the objects which are slightly out of place the ones which don’t belong to the rest of the family?[i] What country are we in, and what is foreign?

And if I imagine different decorative schemes, why not also allow the possibility of different materials?  If everything is not – in truth – white, then everything is not – in truth – made of clay. Might clay represent objects made of glass, or metal?  The clay is, after all, only a base.  Though it makes reference to the conventional material used for these forms, it is one step removed.  It is not glazed, but matte, and as it is only lightly fired, it would not actually be usable.

Where I started off so confidently – looking at this Lot, this ‘Property of a Lady’ – I have come to lose my way, lost in its blankness, unsure of its date, provenance or function, all the criteria which art history, and the auctioneer in particular, value.  The work of Soliz is increasingly provocative in the demands it makes of its audience, letting them loose and unsecured in the shifting sands between art and craft, painting and sculpture, object and image, one and many. Here, moreover, I am also lost in terms of time and place.

Even if the questions I have been led to ask myself as I look at a ‘Property of a Lady’ are not the artist’s own (though some turn out to be close), she has set up the uncertainty of its framework, in which, in asking where its axis lies, we come to realise that we don’t know how to look at this work, from what distance, with what kind of gaze, or with what kind of analysis.

II Feeling

In 1996 Cecile Johnson Soliz took part in a group exhibition at the Castello di Rivara, a privately-owned baroque villa outside Turin.  One of the four Spanish artists in the show had worked with a small local firm which manufactured ceramic stoves, and the owners invited Cecile to visit them there in Castellamonte.[ii] Later that year she returned with a travel grant which allowed her to spend two months living in the Castle, going to the factory each day by bicycle.  What she wished to do was to return to the way stoves would have been made locally in the years around 1900, working empirically from the evidence she could discern from extant examples, including those in the Castello di Rivara itself.

Recovering methodologies by working backwards in this way allows a certain leeway for invention, but the time and effort Soliz has devoted to this process has resulted in sculptures which are more substantial than their modern counterparts.  Not simply larger and heavier, but studied in a way which makes the modern versions seem more like images of the real thing. The summer periods which Soliz has been able to spend at La Castellamonte have so far engendered two sculptures, each of which has taken 12 weeks to press and model, dry, fire, glaze, re-fire and assemble the 39 pieces. The original 10 pieces, from which the others are pressed, took 12 weeks to model by hand and cast. What might look almost like conventional linen-fold patterning is in fact all hand-done; the record of the artist’s tooling the surface. The first (brown) was shown at the Castello in an incomplete version in 2000, the second (green) was produced in 2001.

It was not until 2002 that the sculpture was put into use, appropriately enough in a gallery made out of a former Fireboat station in Bristol.  Making a warm sculpture had always been a key objective. Put simply, it was about making the stove function; put more complexly, it was confronting the physical with the mental; confronting the wish to touch sculpture despite the knowledge of how something will feel.  This surface, however, could now be warm or cold according to the circumstances.  Temperature is not something we often associate with sculpture, even if it is crucial to everyday tactile experience, and crucial also, of course, to ceramic ware.

Soliz went further with her installation in Bristol, because she added to it the sliding wooden benches she had designed and shown first in the National Gallery in Cardiff. These modular maple stools ran along the walls of the room in which the stove stood in the centre.  Thus the stove became ‘Warm’, and the ‘Seating’ retitled ‘Bench-mark’. People were detained in the exhibition space – sitting, talking, looking, feeling – able to make themselves comfortable and to relate to the work in the way that they chose. Meanwhile, of course, the work was already affecting them, warming them up and keeping them there. This is an object which works on a basic physical level while talking about something (the same thing?) that would be defined as conceptual.

‘Warm’ (in green) was shown again at the Lindig in Paludetto gallery in Nuremberg in December 2002, unlit, and we had to imagine its warmth.  If it was a sign of something absent, it was doubly so (having been fired itself). Soliz would now particularly like to show ‘Warm’ in a large space, so that the approaching viewer would go through an area of cold air before sensing the warmth. This would achieve her goal of both accentuating and confusing one’s mental and physical apprehension of the sculpture, which would pass from image to object, and from the purely visual to the physical too.

III Thinking

The artist’s first exhibition was at the Nicola Jacobs Gallery in London in 1989 and she showed sculpture in a context that might be described as painterly. Painting and sculpture are always contiguous for her, and she uses the wall as carefully as a painter would use the canvas or the frame.  Putting objects against the wall is at the core of her practice, and is what she calls still-life. Making shelves for her objects (or sometimes as objects in themselves) is a way of extending the plinth question, while at the same time putting her objects into pictures and controlling their shadows. Different volumes of light not only reveal her works at different times, but also suggest different durees.

The ‘Three Vases’ shown on the balcony in the Milchhof in Nuremberg take on the sober architectural quality of that building.  They are not lit, and high up on the wall come to reside almost as classical relics, self-coloured carvings which might be part of the original building. This quiescence suggests the conjectural, and if they might be mere shadows, or figments, then they come close to being ghosts from the past.

The ‘Three Vases’ in the lower gallery are still too high for us to see their apertures, and thus to judge whether they are the ‘right’ way up. Nevertheless, and seeing it after ‘Property of a Lady’, I have become used to thinking about axes and inversions.  Now the axis is vertical, and the objects continue to question their own obedience.  The creaminess of the white clay suddenly stands out in contrast to the whiteness of the shelf.

The still-lifes begin with an object with which to experiment.  Soliz is interested, firstly, in “plausible” shapes (which are neither fantastic nor concocted), and then in how they belong together. The family seems to be important, for she does not want orphans.  Soliz will then elaborate upon this object; making it look more or less full, looking at it in relationship to others of its kind, showing three together.  How does one represent how much a vessel can hold?  Soliz has always been interested in the openness (or the capacity) of her jugs and bowls (in distinction, she notes, to those of Alan MacCollum), and this allows also of a figurative element without going so far as the figurative.

The physical is perhaps always just below the surface in the work of Soliz; the warmth, the question of touch, the openness, the relating of one to another. More than this, the descriptive anatomy of a jug in fact closely echoes the human: the foot, the body or belly, the neck, shoulder and lip. The size and shape of crockery reflects our hands, as do the tools which help to make them.  Soliz has found a way to be corporeal without being corporeal, or figurative without being narrative.  The symmetry or asymmetry of the jugs and pitchers echoes not only our own bodies, but also the way we see the world.

The ‘block’ sculptures (in which she represents the space around an object in solid clay) which have represented a substantial part of the oeuvre of  Soliz are an attempt to find another way to represent an object and a  sculpture. If an architect can choose to represent a building in section or in elevation, how can a sculptor represent parts of her sculpture?

I thought ‘Property of a Lady’ looked like a painting.  Interestingly enough, it is the first time Soliz has herself used colour. At the Bowes Museum her works were placed in a cabinet with an orange background, and at Barnstable Museum she chose one with a green interior which she echoes in her choice for Nuremberg. The individual breakdown of the cabinets has led her to consider using colour for the background of smaller arrangements, while the overall scale has reawakened her natural interest in the grid structure of the lexicon.  The overlapping nature of the arrangement might also remind one of a collage, as if executed in sheets of overlapping paper.

Lexicons are drawn out on paper; to make one would be to take a step further. But Soliz is interested in establishing what she can do on paper and what she can do in three-dimensions.  The spaces in her watercolours are there partly to provoke her thinking about showing space in her object compositions.  To me these small and carefully painted jugs and cups seem like frames of a film, or of a cartoon, appearing, repeating and blanking. Their intermittent nature is at once quiet and beautiful, and slightly hallucinogenic.  They stay, and they move; they stay, and they go.  They appear in full, then in part; they reassemble and disassemble before my eyes.

Soliz identifies her ‘genres’, or three different ways of representing the subject, as being image, space, and time.  One can see, fairly directly, how the image dominates the still-life works, space the block sculptures, and how time is conveyed by the speed (or the slowness) of the chosen process and the variable fidelity of the execution.  Soliz describes her training at Goldsmiths College in London as being conceptual, and she used whichever medium – film, video, painting – was most appropriate to what she wanted to say.  Nothing has changed so very much then, except that her material expression has come to be worked out in clay, and that this brings with it the question of craft.

Even as children we wonder how to deal with the reality gap in depicting what we see rather than what we know.  It is harder to obey the eye than the head.  At the same time we establish how little one can get away with in terms of a visual vocabulary, and that our audience (our parents and teachers) will more readily understand simplistic stereotypes than more complex transcriptions.   The question of translation, and how we deal with it (or fail to) is key to the enquiry of Soliz. She wonders how to introduce craft into the subject of her work, without it becoming a defining feature of the object we see.  She wonders how to make something slow (or laborious) look quick (or facile).  How near anonymity can one get; how near individuality?

IV Being

Next time she installs ‘Property of a Lady’ Soliz has the pre-meditated option of arranging it differently, and she likes this fact, which is at once quite everyday yet also esoteric. She wonders too how it could grow and change, like things in a life. She would like to see it set within a larger wall, so that it can be seen there as a painting, framed on each side.

In the exhibition In the Midst of Things, held in the town designed for the workers at the Bournville chocolate factory, Soliz tried to reconcile her seemingly idealised work to the everyday situation in which it might find itself, and from which it originates.  She had 50 sets of bone china cocoa pots and cups made to her design in a factory in Stoke-on-Trent.  They were then taken out of their still-life context and returned to life. (This crossover from still-life to active life, from sculpture to object or art to life is expressed also in Soliz’ wish to make a film showing the pots and cups in use.)

Similarly, in Measham (Derbyshire) Soliz worked for over a year in a large factory,[iii] making chimney pots which could be bought and used, just like those on the standard production-line.  As in Italy (but more happily) she worked with and extended a semi-craft-based, semi-industrialised skill, using its essential framework, but individualising it largely by returning to antecedents found in the craft itself.  Soliz uses a technology, learns its parameters, and pushes it a little. In this case she used a software package for engineers alongside the more traditional craft process.  She locates herself deep within a personal experience, but makes it public by making works – the stove, the chimneypot, the cocoa set which may be seen outside the artworld, and which function in a conventional manner. These liminal pieces cross various thresholds beyond that of the public/private; for the artist they are objects with an almost talismanic quality.

This interest in finding ways to be genuinely public now marks out the work of Soliz. She seeks out categories of objects which are located in the public domain, which have evolved through the combination of different experts, experiences and stages over time, and tries to pick them apart or look under their surface.  This search inevitably also takes her to places associated with their fabrication, and what she finds and learns there she brings back into her studio. In working between the hand-made and the factory production-line she places herself in the past, on the edges of the Industrial Revolution, but the questions which her art poses for the present are absolutely topical.

Soliz wants to place her work at the margins of the gallery; associated with a place for looking, but with something else beside. It seems aesthetic (and it is), but it is not esoteric.  In fact it is surprisingly real. She wants to bring some of our more quotidian pleasures and experiences towards our assessment of her art.  But if she adds the very real and everyday to our experience, she also adds something uncanny, for these objects carry their communal histories, so that the noises and movements of the past now provide them with the breath of animation. They are new, and old, oh so old.[iv]

Penelope Curtis

[i] In fact all the objects derive from Chinese Export ware, and are all 18th century.  The original inspiration was (as the title suggests) an auction catalogue; types were subsequently studied in books and drawn directly from examples in the Victoria and Albert Museum in London.

[ii] The firm, founded in the 1970s is called La Castellamonte  and is run by Silvana Neri  and Roberto Perino.

[iii] Red Bank Manufacturing Company, Ltd, Measham, Swadlincote, Derbyshire.

[iv] I am coming to be reminded, as I work on this essay, of one I wrote last year for Tobias Rehberger.  Though his work looks very different, both artists are fundamentally concerned with the adoption and trans-migration of forms across different cultures, and the artist’s role in shaping our understanding of that translation.

Abstract
In this article, artist Cecile Johnson Soliz writes about the complexities of using clay, both in her studio and during her experience of working with clay workers at Red Bank Manufacturing for her project, ‘Skyline’. Tools for making art are of special interest to Johnson Soliz, especially when the very tools she needs do not exist…or do they?

For some years, I have used tools to make sculptures in both studio and factory environments. Each workplace has its own potential, and each has enabled me to make different kinds of work. I have also taken photographs since 1980. I carry a camera – another tool – around with me and record things I see. These experiences in my own studio, in factories and in the world at large have all informed the approach I take to making and teaching art.

In the studio environment, many of the tools I have used are particular to clay. Clay is heavy, especially when wet. It requires you to be very physical, and to take a certain push-and-shove approach from time to time. It is shapeless, it offers no direction and it has no edges. It can seem dumb, formless. It takes shape from what it sits on or next to. When it is a lump, it stays still. It does not fall off a table if you bump into it, like a piece of timber would. If you want to move it you need muscle or equipment, or both. Wet, gray and unformed lumps of clay, whether just extruded as an awkward mass on a pallet or wrapped in a thick, store-bought plastic bag are given form and given shape. This is where tools come into it.

When I first started to use clay, I bought whatever specialist tools I could find, and over time I learned to use them. From this I understood that specialist tools were only as good as I was at using them: no tool would, “do the job” for me, but having the right tool would enable me to realize my intentions more exactly than not. There is also the related question of “skill”: whether one chooses to use it or not. I struggled with this for years after someone told me I was getting ‘too good’ at making things. One does not have to use skill if one has it, but in my view, having the choice gives me the freedom to decide. Like many artists, makers and hobbyists I invented tools because they did not exist. These were either for a particular task or for me, in particular, as a maker. For example, I made profiles that would make a particular shape or I made a tool because it fit my hand better than a standard one, like a modeling knife. If I was to use it everyday, I wanted it to become unnoticeable so I could concentrate on what I was doing rather than it.

I adapted tools, too, to make them particular to my needs. I made a sculpture that was a clay jug and wanted to pierce the entire surface in holes. There are tools that are manufactured to cut holes in clay, but the standard sizes are never particular enough for making art. So I made a “hole-maker” – a plasterboard nail attached to a handle. I pierced the pot at regular intervals to make a pattern that appeared from a distance like surface decoration, but rendering the object unusable. Among my tools now is a whole category of hole-makers, made from things like unwound paper clips, shortened knitting needles, or nails (oval or round). Larger hole-makers can be made from spoons or kitchen knives with their edges ground down or sharpened to make a clean cut. From these early attempts at using and making tools, I began to appreciate artists and other makers who invent tools that bridge thought with the material world in a way that our hands cannot.

During the “’Skyline” project at Red Bank Manufacturing Company between 1998 and 1999, I worked in a building the size of an aircraft hanger. Clay arrived by the ton on pallets covered in polythene. I would look down from the top floor to the ground floor pug mill area and request clay from the workers. “How many pallets?” they would shout back. A forklift truck would arrive and set each pallet down by my workbench. There were 400 men and two women working there. I was one of them.

I worked in the Special Department with architectural “clay workers” (they preferred this job description to “craftsmen” or “ceramicists”). These men followed in the footsteps of their parents and grandparents, working with clay from an early age. The choice they had was either “coal miner or clay worker” they told me. Clay workers made architectural ceramics by commission to replace broken pieces from private and public buildings throughout the country. They also produced dozens of chimney pots, finials and other architectural clay objects that were transported each week across the country and abroad. Each week they were given a list of objects to be made and each object had its given time allocation. If the list could be completed early, then the end of the week would be less hurried. The work was hard and every effort was made to save time and energy.

The clay workers used many tools, including molds, to do their work. They made tools from anything. If needed, there was a resident carpenter whose skills might be employed in exchange for Mars Bars, but everyone learned to have a go at improving a tool or way of making an object. Butter knives disappeared from their kitchens at home to end up, for example, as a tool for smoothing off finials. Yet a good tool was meant to last for life. It was unheard of to borrow or take someone else’s tools – they were irreplaceable, and great pride was taken in having a good collection of them.

After seeing a traditional “Captain Pot” at Red Bank, I became interested in the iconographic potential of the spiral. Practically speaking these spirals guide wind up and rain down a chimney’s shaft. Visually, they guide the eye up and down the profiles’ patterns and play with the space in between the pots. I thus developed a series of wooden profiles incorporating architectural features such as stairs, chimneystacks, roof frames, doors and other geometric shapes. My spirals, it seemed, protruded much further than in any previous chimney pots and there was much discussion about my designs and tools – about whether they would stand up with so much additional weight packed on to them. Would the spirals peel off when fired in the kiln? Could they be lifted when wet? One of the first “tall” pots I made, which was six foot tall and nearly three foot in profile, was so heavy that when my coworkers tried to lift it, it toppled over and was returned to its original, formless state within seconds. The clay workers were surprised that the weight of these additional spirals made the daily task of moving a tall pot from one place to another so challenging and unfamiliar.

The profile tools, pieces of hard wood made to fit my hand and shaped mainly from scraps, were all experiments: Some designs worked and some failed. At the early stages of the project I returned to the Sculpture Department at Cardiff School of Art and Design and used the computer-engineering program “Form Z” to visualize the profiles on the pots before heavy labor began. I was nervous about turning up to a factory full of men and not knowing what I was going to do. I liked the idea that I would save myself hard physical work to figure it out, but things didn’t work out that way. With the program I could draw the profiles, place any number of them onto a shaft, push a button and watch each one wrap around the shaft to create an image of the pot as it would be when made. After hours of learning the program I gained some skill in using it and made numerous line drawings that I used to document the pot types that I made. While it was seductive to watch the pots emerge on screen, the labor involved to draw them and the way the process was organized by the computer program itself didn’t allow me to learn how to think visually and spatially about what I was doing physically (with the clay). I had thought the computer could be a useful tool and wanted to explore the relation of the Form Z program to the simpler, more direct processes of drawing and making, but in the end I sketched profile shapes by hand and faxed them to a helper in Cardiff who then made them on a bandsaw and sander and posted them back. As for the actual A4 computer drawings, most of them ended up being folded and turned into templates to draw the diagonals on the pot shafts upon which I would laboriously pack the clay to build up the profiles.

There were days of to-ing and fro-ing from workbench to pot: picking the profiles up and putting them down, dipping them in water to slide them across the clay, watching the clay fill the profile, pulling the excess clay off and pressing the bulk of it into shape. After each experiment, I wrapped the pot in order to regulate the moisture in and around it-letting it into the atmosphere in a controlled way, so the profile would stick well enough to the shaft and dry with it at the same speed. Economy of time and materials are important in the factory; every object with its allocated time for making made my uncertainty appear as a luxury. The notion that I could spend days experimenting with tools and designs was inconceivable to my coworkers.

One last thing that caught my attention was how clay workers were each given a letter or number that they stamped into each object they made. This enables work to be traced back to them in case of faults, whether a single one or many. The name of the worker is never seen, and one of his tools is his stamp, which he uses to sign his engagement with the process of making. At Red Bank, even though objects and material had names, it didn’t mean you had to use them for what they were called – anything went – even better if it entertained. We bantered endlessly about this, about what I was making. Were they chimney pots? Sculptures? A hybrid? One day, Pete, one of the very inventive clay workers, walked across the huge floor and propped himself on my workbench and said, “What you are making is a sculpture that looks like a chimney pot that will be used as an umbrella stand,” and walked away.

When and how do things get names and how useful are they really? In the spaces of studio and factory when faced with inventing tools to give shape to half-formed thoughts, sometimes words don’t help. Words are afterthoughts. They can be used after the creative process is competed but not always during the process. Have you ever lost touch with words and names after a long period in the studio? I have. And it is the experience of losing touch with words that reminds me of the primary role played by tools and tooling in the making of sculpture.

Cecile Johnson Soliz
2010

I make all objects by hand. I make them as close to the originals as possible (as in ‘Twenty –Eight Pitchers’). It is important that I make it, not because of any romantic idea to do with touch, but because it is a way of asking questions to do with how we know things conceptually, visually and physically and about the status we give things.

I have a lot more freedom if I make the objects. Over time I’ve got better at it and many of them look manufactured (which is interesting!). This way I can choose more exactly what I want to do, instead of always responding to the world of manufacture or ready-made things.

Q: To what extent do you view it as the de-functioning of a teapot (in removing its handle) or the creation of an art object?

In ‘Black Teapot’ I altered the idea of what a common tea pot is by making it handle less, but I did not de-functionalize it in a practical sense, to use your phrase. It could still work. The plinth it was exhibited on and where it is placed defunctionalizes it more than not having handles!

Because this object plays so much on how we think about it (how we know things), not having a handle makes what is thought of as absent more present – because you can’t help but think about it… it’s not there! This is what I was trying to do. Sometimes I acknowledge things by leaving them out. This curiously makes us more aware of them than if they were there.

If ‘Black Teapot’ were used, human hands would replace the handles. I like the idea that someone might think to use his or her hands as a part of the teapot. I also like the idea that someone might simply contemplate this option when looking at it – how they might pick it up. I like the to-ing and fro-ing of thinking about things and physically engaging with them, or nearly engaging with them. In other works I have made that do have a function, I play with this notion.

Q: You seem to take history into consideration in your work, in terms of the evolution of the vessel. How do you think the modern teapot fits into this evolution of functionality and basic design?

The modern tea pot does it’s job OK (if the spout works well!). It still looks like it did in the 17th century when it was developed in Europe and still looks historical.

The evolution of the teapot is a fascinating story that starts in the East and that I am sure has echoes all over the world. Another work I made, ‘Property of a Lady’ is exactly about this idea that objects transmigrate across places and time. It is fascinating to see how some cultures at a given time own a kind of object that later, another culture might adopt by copying and altering it to suit them, and making it ‘their own’, like the teapot.

I chose the shape for ‘Black Teapot’ because it seemed the most interesting in terms of reflection, it seemed the most common in terms of known shape that spanned more than one class and it seemed plausible as a large size teapot (the rounder ones became ridiculous looking when made large). So I could do what I wanted – explore what I wanted -in terms of an artwork while still letting it appear very much like a teapot.

I think a lot of design evolution intention is to focus on new designs: ideas of the future, fashion or novelty and often makes references to art or design history. I guess a designer would fully engage in history everyday when trying to design something. If you asked the question, ‘What could a teapot be today?’ I am sure it wouldn’t need to look like it did in 1730!

Q: How do you feel the shelf of, ‘Light Shelf’, alters the space that it’s in?

It makes you more aware of it.

Q: As a shelf made out of a delicate material to support such a weightless thing as light, how would you say this redefines our perception of the functionality of the shelf?

The shelf does not have to be hand height – it becomes something to be looked at and to lead you to contemplate other things.

As you look at it, the shelf becomes a thing in itself – it transforms from being something within a functional space to being in a more 2 D space and as such more like an image than an object. It acts as a bridge to contemplating light by casting shadows that move with the changing light in the space it is exhibited in.

I have always wanted to acknowledge light in the works I have made. Someone pointed out to me that without it we would see nothing, yet it is very unnoticed. So ‘Light Shelf’ acknowledges that without the light to see the work, it wouldn’t exist. Ironically the light never sits on the shelf – it always escapes it, but the light supports the shelf, or rather us seeing it!

Q: I feel that in both these works there is a certain wit. To what extent is humour a consideration in your work?

I love the idea that things are not always as we think they are. Humour has always been a possibility if you ask the question, ‘What happens if I turn this upside down?’ or, ‘What happens if I leave this part off?’ etc. If you begin asking questions about how we know things, how we give shape to things and make sense, then humour has to play a part because they inevitably become nonsensical at some stage. Humour enables us to stand back a little and look at things – a form of irony that I like. It’s also a way to engage the body in looking. If you laugh your belly jiggles!

Q: What is your personal relationship with technology and invention? Does this impact the way you create or think about your work?

Yes, I love seeing new ways of doing things. In one project, ‘Skyline’ I used an engineering drawing programme, Form Z, to draw chimney pots and made them with craftsmen in a factory. Bringing the new technology and the artisans skills together was very interesting.

I really love inventing things. I grew up making things in my family – functional things and non-functional things, so there is a certain naturalness and enjoyment to it for me. Many things are not made that people need or would enjoy, so being able to think inventively and make things is wonderful.

Q: For many, pottery appears to have its roots in creating functional items – how do you feel the use of this discipline impacts the final works?

I have always exhibited in a fine art context (except once) because what I do is in conversation with fine art, its discussions and debates that have evolved over the centuries. I have at times wanted to crash boundaries and hierarchies to do with Fine Art, Craft and Design and am happiest when in a Fine Art context – it enables me to make my intentions clear so my reasons for employing clay are not confusing.

Q: Do you have any requirements for the way the works are displayed?

Always. Every work has definite presentation and installation requirements as this is a part of the work – how it is perceived and understood. I design all shelving and plinths and have a shop fitter make them. Detailed drawings are always supplied. I like this part of the process – I use all kinds of ‘making do’ materials to mock up the size and shape of the object I have made.

‘Black Teapot’ and ‘Light Shelf’ Conversation between Cecile Johnson Soliz and Deborah Basckin, 1999

‘Seeing and using the objects of various cultures has always fascinated me, especially experiencing them in situ: in a private collection, domestic setting, a roadside, in market places: using a palm leaf as a plate (Timbuktu, Mali) or a piece of newsprint as a container for fish and chips (England), having my photo taken by a photographer who used a wall papered box as a camera with a bottle-lid as a lens cap (Santa Cruz, Bolivia), being shown an extraordinary collection of miniature tea sets and pitchers which almost lined an entire living-room (Essex, England), being warming by a Renaissance stufa or picking up a Greek vase to find it practically weightless (Trento, Italy). Experiencing objects first hand is different from appreciating them in museums.’

Cecile Johnson Soliz