So through conversation with Tamlin Lundberg (ceramicist) I discovered that Lowestoft also had a porcelain factory and also that the 'Time and Tide museum' held a core sample of the area , so I went to investigate. The core sample was not especially amazing, nor where the examples of Lowestoft ceramics although some things touched me. I was taken by the photographs of Tony Ray Jones showing daily life in Britain during the 60's and how some of the images reminded me of life in the 70's through the world of my grandparents. How somehow, elements of life become frozen for a generation. An example may be the hairstyles kept by women from the times of their teenage years or items of clothing.
Something else which resonated with me here was the ceramic bobbins used to make lace and the lung medicine. My mother is probably on my mind and her terminal illness from working in the textile industry in Nottinghamshire.
What's also interesting is the link to the lace curtain. I remember my Grandfather putting them up at home just like this.
Having spoken to Alice Lyons again about the other thread within my thinking about returning the work to where it came from and the thoughts about burial urns, it was suggested I should visit the british museum to look at different forms of burial sarcophagi and urns.
I had not been to the museum for many years and was impressed by the new space and the siting of the 'house frontal pole' from British Columbia obviously because my mind has become attuned to the column/totemic image.
Obviously, I was intrigued by the simple shapes I saw, the more animalistic or figurative imagery/shapes didn't really seem relevant, however the monumental forms I saw had an impact and the incised marks and the cataloguing of the work really intrigued me too.
I was also interested how the curator had linked ritual and the mystic to the sense of religion bound up in funeral rites....but also to the thinking of the alchemists, who are consistently linked to the work of the potter.
Rachel White read at Tate Britain
After following Rachels work for some time through I suppose the eyes of a painter, seeing her work afresh in some sense now as a sculptor of sorts brings new things. Whilst thinking about her work from a two dimensional perspective its just as easy to have an empathy or understanding of her use of space or absence of presence but its almost as is I am drawn even closer to her thinking via the explorations in my own work. Whether this work is politically related to Nazism and the Jews or not I found her book corridors captivating as the remaining space and the material of the work itself seemed weighted with layers of potential 'narrative' and temporal nodes.
