Line & Form - Review, Ceramic Review. Tony Franks, 202 July/August 2003
What is Craft, Exhibition Catalogue Hub. Dr Elizabeth Goring, September 2003
Northern Exposure, Sunday Herald Magazine. Stephen Phelan, 1st April 2001
MINDSIGHT
Surface & Shape catalogue essay
Stuart Bennett
August 2005
‘Mindsight’ has been touted as an explanation in the belief of a sixth sense. A scientific attempt to categorise what is essentially a feeling or impulse. It would be intriguing to find out if those with this ‘attentional mechanism’ are in some way creative. There are good reasons why some people choose to react to the world around them in a specific artistic manner. The embodiment of these responses is varied and sensory; tactile, aural, gustatory, olfactory, visual; verbal definitions that attempt to describe senses and order our reactions using the confines of language. But a creative reification of the fabric of our environment often eludes distinct classification.
So perhaps there are good reasons for suppressing this appetite to define art. Using words to say what things are can have the polar effect from what was intended. Instead of making the pertinent qualities more distinct, it deadens their imprint, imports and constructs a scaffold that hides the honest texture of the work.
Frances Priest’s work is questioning and curious. It doesn’t provide us with answers but provokes quiet reaction and essential movement. Space is measured, carved up, contained and re-presented. Air is coerced into collaboration with physical form. Lines oscillate just below the surface. Segments reference the recognisable and hint at the arcane. We circumnavigate the objects realising there is no front and back, wary of their apparent precarious stance.
Drawings act as a seed from which the forms germinate, gently nudged by the fabric of the artist’s changing environment. Extrinsic influences from intensive research and travel hint and punctuate. Architectural skins and painted exteriors mesh to refine detailed decoration (in the true sense of the word; graceful, exquisite, harmonious) that tensely clings and burrows into elegant curved slabs. Images of ancient cloth vie with a dusty studio rag to weave their impression into the filtering mind of the maker and out onto the objects. The tools employed to encrust the forms articulate an indelible and inimitable dialect.
Poetically pushing against the immediacy of our image saturated visual culture Frances Priest creates her work with the gestation of physical process. Some are as large as she can make and the kilns can fire. Rules are established, followed and inevitably broken. The sense of movement and changing of depth in the topmost boundary of each object echoes the industry of the practice. Through this residual shift the edge between two and three dimensions is challenged. This liminality and merging of distinctions is evident in these objects. The edge just holds them up and in; the inlaid drawing lets our eyes move from solid to air to solid with fluidity. Surface generates shape generates surface. There is a purpose but not a utilitarian one. It is neither one thing nor another, neither one discipline nor another. It is immediate, tense and particular with a weighty nod to tradition and a clear measure of where it sits.
If tested I expect Frances Priest would have ‘mindsight’. Her physical response to our world is crisp and incisive, instinctively on the sensory threshold. ‘I think it links to the idea of finding forms and collections of marks that have, for some indefinable reason, a sense of harmony, balance, ‘rightness.’ This ability has no categorical term. So perhaps we should devolve our reaction to this body of work into instinct and impulse, appreciate the intention, accept the blurring of boundaries and be thankful of the space in our world these elegant physical statements command.
©Stuart Bennett 2005
Line & Form - Review
Ceramic Review
Tony Franks
202 July/August 2003
With Frances Priest’s debut show, the Scottish Gallery discovers another Northern star. Since her degree and postgraduate Edinburgh shows of 1998 and 1999 the artist has been ardently following a highly personal direction, initially in fine constructed bone china and lately the more robust sweeping slabs of ivory coloured porcelaneous clay displayed here.
The exhibition title is Line & Form, and one could say that this is a show essentially about drawing, discovering form through drawing both with and on the clay. The forms are abstract, simple and precise but it would be wrong to say they are minimalist or even quiet: there is so much to enjoy in these tense vibrant curves, their polished tapering thickness and their expansive surfaces. Even without the engraved lines these slabs provoke dialogue between the confident protective exterior walls and the sheltered enclosed spaces within, but when we indulge ourselves by engaging with the drawing we are swept around these curving shapes by strong inlaid intersecting lines or encouraged to linger among groups of tentatively scratched or transferred interior markings. The subtle changes of pace and mood created by the drawings encourage the viewer to explore at length, squeezing between the towering walls as one might through a pair of Richard Serra’s massive steel slabs. The space within and around these half meter forms seems vast.
It is difficult to find a ceramic family in which to place this work. Gordon Baldwin might be appropriate in relation to sensitive placing of marks on surfaces, and Ken Eastman in thinking of his shadowy volumes contained within towering slabs; the general language of abstraction in all three is familiar while remaining quite individual. In her catalogue introduction, Amanda Game is reminded of Ben Nicholson’s painted reliefs for their particularity, their absolute rightness of being. Frances Priest approaches that quality, and for one just setting out, that is praise indeed.
'What is Craft'
Exhibition Catalogue
Hub
Dr Elizabeth Goring
September 2003
I was stopped in my tracks by the harmony and rightness of her sophisticated, confident forms. It demonstrates a tacit understanding of form, volume, line surface space and lightly worn technical mastery of material. I believe this combination of hand, heart and eye could only have been achieved within the context of craft
Northern Exposure
Sunday Herald Magazine
Stephen Phelan
1st April 2001
Moulding herself an international reputation as a ceramist is the easy part for Frances Priest. Getting art lovers to accept that her talent belongs in the same league as painting and drawing is another challenge altogether.
No one endeavour - sporting, professional or artistic- can be considered superior, or even comparable, to another. It’s for those who have applied themselves to a single pursuit to organise a criterion for evaluation, to assess what constitutes an achievement within the field, and to endow recognition accordingly. But if the world of ceramics can be considered, for a moment, in boxing terms, then Frances Priest, is a handy young blood who’s already a contender at international level, chasing the titles and gaining a rep.
Actually, that’s a stupid comparison, and she is far too modest a lady to ever indulge it. But she’s just back from ‘Talente’ in Germany, one of the largest design fairs in Europe, where her work was specially selected for exhibition. She’s shortly heading to the 52nd International Ceramics Competition in Faenza, Italy. And she’s not going - but the work is - to compete at the 2001 World Ceramics Exposition “a massive, massive exhibition that I’ve only just found out about” in Kyonggi province, Korea. Grand prize 30,000,000 wuon (whatever that's worth) and a study scholarship.
“It’s exciting even to be selected for these things, because they’re decided by an international panel of judges, and you never know what may come of it - there's a big glossy catalogue floating round the galleries of europe with my work in it.”
This work, for those pig ignorant about ceramics, is “basically applied art”.
“That’s a term developed over the last ten years or so. Previously it would have been called “Crafts”. It comes down to working with materials - using things like clay, glass and textiles, to produce decorative and sculptural objects which rely pretty heavily on the craftsmanship of the material, but don’t necessarily have a functional use.”
Many people, of course, like their arts kept separate from their crafts. This is now an empirical world, and for many, art doesn't actually do anything. Craft, on the other hand, is supposed to be more of a trade, the dignified practice of creating a thing with a tangible use.
“For a lot of people it can be quite difficult to understand. They want to know what a thing actually does - ‘Is it a cup or isn't it?’ But no one thinks twice about putting a little Staffordshire figure on a mantle piece. To be honest that’s not all that relevant these days. Why not have a piece of sculpture instead?”
The same people would never consider this a profession (“People always ask the question - how do you make a living? Which you wouldn’t ask a merchant banker.”), but until she wins that 30,000,000 wuon, Priest can’t call it that either. She pays the rent with gallery work and teaching jobs. She’s done a year “as an Artist in Residence/Technician” at a private school and is running a ten week class for architecture students at Edinburgh College of Art, where she herself studied.
“The students can choose an elective to broaden their horizons. So I get them into clay and we have a bit of a laugh.”