louisewinter

When asked recently which artists or individuals he most admired, acclaimed ceramicist Julian Stair replied flatly, ‘Dead ones. There’s more scope for interpretation.’ Perhaps unsurprisingly then, his latest solo exhibition at mima is titled, Quietus: The vessel, death and the human body, in which Stair explores the ritual containment of the human body after death.

Far from being macabre, the ceramic vessels, cinerary jars and life-size sarcophagi, with their somatic references, are reminiscent of the Deleuzian image of the ‘body without organs’. The press release categorises Stair’s approach as celebratory, and, at the very least, it can be viewed as a celebration of the artist’s belief that pottery, as one of the simplest and most enduring crafts, can articulate the most complex of ideas.

However, before we get too comfortable, we must acknowledge this affirmative as problematic, not least because it downplays the more difficult aspects of the exhibition such as: how do we confront the unavoidability of death? Or, as Hirst once put it, ‘The physical impossibility of death in the mind of someone living’. Such contentions propel Stair’s work beyond a straight- forward appreciation of its compelling aesthetic qualities and superb technical accomplishment, doubtless though they are.

Funerary objects grouped according to their formal similarities are spread across four rooms of the ground floor galleries at mima. In the first room, Stair takes his cue from the tradition of Columbaria in which rooms or entire buildings are set aside to pay respect to the deceased whose remains are held in cinerary jars, often stacked from floor to ceiling.

Encountering the installation of around 130 such jars in blacks, greys, ochres, terracotas and whites, which scale the gallery wall, is a vertigo inducing experience which rapidly gives way to the feeling that you are descending into an Alice and Wonderland like rabbit hole as objects appear to float above you. This fracturing, or sense of de-stabilisation, returns us to the here and now of present experience usually symptomatic of the sublime.

The second room, packing less of a punch than the first, though notable for its challenging of the boundaries of accepted ceramic scale, contains horizontal life-size sarcophagi. In stark contrast to the funerary vessels we are familiar with, these forms are simple and unadorned, Stair dispensing with any unnecessary ornateness preferring to draw instead on the objects inherent symbolic language.

The exhibition reaches its crescendo in the third room where Stair presents a series of monumental vertical jars, some as high as two metres, that reference a tradition known as Extreme Inhumation where the body is interred upright and fully extended, running counter to the prevailing tradition of placing the body horizontally.

Designed to be viewed in the round, the robust vessels form a forest of jars. Unable to penetrate the enigmatic interiors (their height making it all but impossible to peer inside them) we are compelled to traverse its surfaces that quietly reveal the character of their making. Built up in successive tiers, any excess clay that has been spilled or scraped at the edges of each adjoining layer, have been preserved by the artist -the residues providing each vessel with a kind of fingerprint.

The anthropomorphic references interred within these objects leads us fittingly onto the final room in which we encounter the remains of Stair’s Uncle-in-law, Les Cox. In the centre of the room is a single cinerary jar. At either side are a slide show of photographs and video projection of Cox. Are Stair’s relative’s remains in the jar? If so, has Stair fallen at the last hurdle? That is, surely the successes of the exhibition so far have rested in Stair’s ability to evoke human presence precisely through its absence, by mediating between being and nothingness and by denying the functionality of the very objects he displays?

After some digging (pardon the pun) it is revealed that the jar was actually created using Cox’s ashes within the clay’s composition during the formative stages of production, echoing the development of bone china- a type of porcelain combining clay, minerals, sand and cow bone ash. In so doing, Stair avoids the sensationalism that would accompany the more usual interring of human remains. Instead we are left with an ambiguous composite, with Cox’s own request to be so interred, perhaps capable of revealing more than any slide show or video projection.

The critique of containment, with which we began, ends by presenting us with an unavoidable yet awkward question: Do Stair’s preserved objects emphasize the abstract container of the gallery itself as a kind of mausoleum, dedicated to an artist and their life’s achievement? For me, Stair fails to mount a significant enough challenge to this proposition for me to think otherwise.

http://www.artselector.com/review/18973/julian-stair-quietus