My Brian pots came as an idea inspired from the journeys I have done in the last four years. The design is not from one particular culture, but a mixture of more than one.
In 2000 I lived in Kenya for almost a year. My partner and me organized a cycling journey, with local artists, from Nairobi, Kenya to Dar-Es-Salaam, Tanzania called ‘Bike Art 2000 Afrika’. We made art, played music on the way and organized a show in the end of our journey. I experienced corruption, injustice, poorness, illness but also lots of smiles, laughter, community spirit and a lifestyle close to nature.
Meeting a totally different culture so closely changed my view of life forever; I came back to Europe feeling grateful for the fact that I’m a Norwegian and a woman with all the possibilities in the World. I can travel anywhere, I can study, I can always make money in some way, I can believe in whatever I want, give my vote to whoever I want, and I will probably never starve. But I also came back with more critical eyes to our Western lifestyle, which is fed by goods and cheap workforce from the Third World. In return we send them our Western rubbish, like tons of second hand TV’s, mobile phones, cars and clothes, which ruin their own production, market, economics and culture. The people I met in Africa taught me that I don’t need much to be happy.
In 2002 we organized ‘Aventura Artistica’, where we walked through the Andes in Ecuador with a mule, playing music on the way. This way of travelling enabled us to meet the local people in a closer way than we would have done in a vehicle. I was amazed and impressed by the people we met whose homes were grass huts and everything they ate came from what they had planted themselves. In some places we walked through they didn’t even have any money currency.
In Ecuador we went to a small mountain village, called Jatumpamba, where the female inhabitants have been making pottery in the same way for thousands of years. I attended a workshop learning how to make pre-Columbian pots. We collected clay and sand from local sources, all carried by humans or donkeys. We mixed sand and clay with our naked feet. We shaped the big pots without a wheel, but by walking in circles around the pot. The pots were fired in an enormous bonfire outside.
I felt I was part of something much bigger than myself, a part of something much older than I know, and at the same time something very real. This experience resulted in me taking a ceramic degree at Falmouth College of Arts.
The shape of the pots I am making for my degree show are ancient looking, which is influenced by what I saw and learned during my stay in these two different continents.
The round-bottom shape is found worldwide and it represents an ancient experience for me.
These pots are used mainly for cooking or food storage. In their natural environment they don’t need support for standing because they are made for being placed on soft ground, like sand or soil. The one who is preparing the food is often sitting close to the ground, and choosing which angle the pot is facing makes it easier to reach what is inside, or to put things into the pot. To have a rounded bottom pot doesn’t make much sense in our culture, since we have mostly flat and hard surfaces where we cook (and everywhere else). That is why I choose to use sand instead of ring-stands etc. for these pieces in the show. I want to enhance the ancient look of my work, and also make a point out of how far from the natural world we live our lives.
The influences for other shapes I am making is a mixture of pots I have seen in real and in images from books and the Internet.
I want my work to communicate a message from a different time and from a different world.
I am passionate about the important issues how the modern and post-modern world is loosing the feeling of community and tribe. We have lost the ‘big family’ here in the north and we let our old folks sit in old peoples home alone. We don’t know the name of our neighbours, and for many people their way of having contact with the outer world is through the inside of a car, internet and chatting, television, telephone. People spend more time with machines than with other humans. As Suzy Gablik states in ‘The Reenchantment of Art’: There is a great need for new forms emphasizing our essential interconnectedness rather than separateness, forms evoking the feeling of belonging to a larger whole rather expressing the isolated and alienated self.’
I also want my pots to communicate how we, in the Western World, need to think through what kind of lifestyle we are having, and how much damage we are doing to the environment and to people in the rest of the World.
In these days of global warming we need to change the way we are living. World Watch Institute 1990 report said:’ without transformation of individual priorities and values – materialism cannot survive the transition to a sustainable world. It requires that we personally leave behind certain things that have been a central part of our individual and cultural self-definitions’.
The imagery I’ve chosen to enhance this message is personated through Brian’s stories, which are sgraffitoed onto the surface of the pots and decorated with burnished slips.
Brian lives in a post-modern westernized world. His daily life rituals are both ancient and new.
Hunting is done with a car. The beast is tamed with doggie biscuits and doggie bags.
Physical exertion is gained in the gym. Evening stories are told by the television
Brian tries to be good, recycles his beer cans and sends things to Africa.
He is just a normal person doing normal every day things.
The influence for the way of depicting stories in this way comes from all the happy hours I spent in my childhood ploughing through comics like Donald Duck, Asterix and later Gary Larson’s Far Side.
In my life movement is very important. A main ingredient of my existence is walking, cycling and dancing. I found it a challenge to try to communicate movement through ceramics, which have a more still voice. I try to animate my work.
In the first year of this course I made ‘the Fatmen on Springs’ which make a wobbly movement if you give them a gentle push. In the second year I made ‘Udu Drums’ which ask for interaction, and have movement of air inside them.
In the Brian Pots I go back in the early beginning of animation and tell a story with connecting pictures. The pot is not moving but it is inviting the viewer to walk around it to read the story.
I enjoy contrasting the old and the new. From a distance the viewers might think that these is a ancient looking pots with ancient looking decorations, but when they come closer they probably get a surprise finding a Brian driving a car or carrying a TV.
I have many plans for Brian, and the stories are not stopping here; He still needs a job, a girl friend some more bad habits and maybe he can save the world. I’m looking forward to a great future with the life of Brian!
Eva Ronnevig 2005
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