|
| |
Modern Sculpture, Medieval Iconography: Philip Eglin at the V&A
From: The Victoria and Albert Museum
| By:
Alun Graves |
EDITOR'S INTRODUCTION |
In a recent series of work, Philip Eglin, one of Britain's most respected ceramicists, has drawn inspiration from the Victoria and Albert Museum's collection of northern medieval woodcarvings. On show at the V&A until December 2, 2001, this new work was shown alongside the original medieval sculptures of the Virgin Mary, the selection of which was made by the artist himself. V&A curator Alun Graves discusses Eglin's playful and inspired convergence of medieval iconography with contemporary images. |
 | |
| Alun Graves discusses Philip Eglin's series of ceramic works inspired by medieval woodcarvings. | |
 ritish ceramicist Philip Eglin has long made figurative works. Loose-limbed nudes, seated or reclining, have become timeless observers of our own times, their surfaces awash with images and motifs drawn from contemporary culture, from fine art, and from the ceramic heritage of the Staffordshire Potteries. The strongly graphic qualities of these earlier figures, with their seemingly relaxed sense of line, has invited comparison with the works of the sixteenth-century German painter, Lucas Cranach. More recently, however, Eglin has drawn inspiration from northern medieval woodcarvings. At the 2001 Eglin exhibition at the Victoria and Albert Museum, large-scale earthenware Madonnas and smaller porcelain figure groups were presented alongside the V&A medieval woodcarvings that inspired them. |
Appropriately enough given the constant interplay between surface and form, between line and volume, that exists in his work, the original inspiration for Eglin's series of Madonnas came not through direct examination of the carvings themselves, but through the study of photographs in Paul Williamson's catalogue, Northern Gothic Sculpture. Communication, reproduction, translation: Eglin's work in every way seems to bridge the gap between tradition and the twin pillars of mass communication and mass consumption that characterise our age. Increasingly drawn to the images he had seen, Eglin made forays into the museum's sculpture collections, examining the work at close hand, making drawings, absorbing ideas. |
Eglin has captured something of the robustness and solidity of the carvings, their quietly insistent demand for attention, their beauty and grace. If he has observed with sensitivity the aesthetic qualities of these most exceptional of works, he has, however, equally understood their nature as artefacts. For these works are survivors, damaged, mutilated even, but enduring. There is, in fact, something almost defiant in Eglin's recognition of the damage as vital components of their form. The loss of the Virgin's nose, the reduction of the Infant Christ to a mere stump--such features, when assimilated into Eglin's own works, seem to lend them a history of their own and to increase their feeling of timelessness. On his porcelain Madonnas, he often takes the additional step of adding touches of gilding to these mutilated features. This treatment, a strange parody of the practice of using gilding to conceal firing defects in porcelain, serves only to emphasise the disfigurement, and to question our response to the aesthetics of the works. Quite clearly, romantic notions of loss and decay come to play in our appreciation of the sculptures, in much the same way as when confronted with a medieval ruin. |
Eglin's response to the materiality of the carvings extends also to an interest in their roughly hewn or hollowed-out backs. These areas of the works, which would never have been seen as originally displayed, have been explored by Eglin and have become an integral feature of his own figures. The lowly status of these 'private' areas has been further enhanced in his works by the placement of images. This investigation of the carvings 'in the round' perhaps also owes its inspiration to Williamson's catalogue, which, with documentary candour, gives equal prominence to illustrations of backs and fronts. |
The surfaces of both Eglin's earthenware and his porcelain figures are themselves rich and complex, offering a tableau of references both to contemporary life and to the works' own ceramic lineage. The free handling of paint on the earthenware pieces thus recalls the pottery figures of nineteenth-century Staffordshire, and immediately plays on the contradictions of 'high' and 'popular' art. Investigation of the porcelain works, however, brings out these contradictions to the full, as their surfaces reveal the impressions of the detritus of modern living. Milk cartons, fast food containers, and plastic bottles have all left their mark. Indeed, such objects have been used to mould sections of the figures. Apparently disparate elements thus combine to form a complex but articulate statement of twenty-first century aesthetics and visual culture, in which the past has been recycled to take its rightful place in the present. |
|
| |
