Black & White, Ceramic, And Totally Personal: The sculptures of Katherine Morling
In the build-up to the 2012 Summer Olympics, Katharine Morling was one of some seventy artists that the British government commissioned for pieces that visualized the spirit of municipalities around the realm. Arts Council England and the Council for Stoke-on-Trent (a city in the landlocked county of Staffordshire) proposed that Morling could create a collection inspired by the archaeological marvel known as the Staffordshire Hoard.
Discovered in Staffordshire in 2009, the Hoard is the largest-ever found repository of Anglo-Saxon metalwork artefacts. It unearthed three thousand five hundred pieces of engraved gold and silver that are rife with depictions of deities, heroes and monsters carved in brilliant relief against the gleaming, precious metals. The project offered no shortage of inspirational fodder, as well as an international stage. Morling, however, nearly passed on the opportunity.
“I just didn’t know if I could do it,” she says. “My art is completely personal. It was a very difficult decision. But, I went ahead and accepted the project, and couldn’t be happier with the result. I made what I wanted to make, and the pieces had my touch on them. Everyone was so supportive, and I really enjoyed the experience. Still, it was very different from how I usually work.”
The ten pieces that Morling produced are collectively known as Morling and the Hoard. They can be seen in the permanent display at the Potteries Museum & Art Gallery in Stoke-on-Trent, and feature such fearsome sights as a man-boar holding prisoner a clutch of woodland creatures, an eagle dressed in full armor, and an anthropomorphic frog riding atop a rather proud dragon.
Morling and the Hoard leverages many of the proclivities which marked the artist’s initial rise to fame. The series has the trappings of a typical example from Morling’s oeuvre. Each work is rendered in the artist’s signature mode of porcelain sculpture with edges and details embellished by an atramentous stain. Several of the creations manifest her urge to arrange individual components into a single composition, especially the man-boar and his captives.
“A lot of my work is made with components,” says Morling. “I make a lot more than is necessary, so I lay everything out. It’s like flower arranging, putting them all together. You just get to a point, after a lot of standing back, where you just know what’s right. I trust that it’s the right thing.”
The Hoard limited series, however, is missing the autobiographical connection between artist and artwork which has driven Morling’s rise to international prominence. A far more usual expression of her talents can be found in the oft-reported on Poison Pen (2010). The composition is one of several series of typewriter-centric arrangements. The piece reads as a collection of items that might readily be spotted among the contents of a professional workspace. There are rulers, compasses, and other such devices, in a cup to one side of the typewriter, and a pair of glasses resting on a stack of papers to the other. The typewriter itself features keys all askew, leaning, almost swaying. The work references Morling’s difficulties growing up and living with dyslexia, the keys portrayed as she sees them, all but impossible to use.
Other artworks, though undoubtedly originating in autobiography, point toward more universal themes. Undercurrent, for example, depicts two rotary telephones arranged so that each acts as the base of the other. One of the telephones appears normal, ready to use, while the other has keys exploding out of the dial and letters, similarly, blasting upward from the receiver. The telephones become metaphors for the two most basic elements of any conversation—the one that’s said and the one that’s unsaid, by carelessness or by design. These inherent or implied meanings are almost always secondary to the act of creation. “I really try not to worry about what a piece is about or what it’s called,” Morling says. “Someone will ask me what a piece is about, and then I’ll really start to understand it. I don’t really get it until after I make it.”
One piece proved so personal that Morling could not stand the idea of seeing it rehomed. This work, title “Rest a While,” features a little person on a log, holding a house and bearing a snail’s shell on their back. Morling says, “It was about my not having a home, at one point. I lived in my studio, and I was moving around. It was about the idea of home and whether it was something internal, and my thinking about what sort of stability I needed.” Soon after finishing “Rest a While,” Morling received a commission that provided enough money for a deposit on a home.
“I never thought that would happen. I just thought, I need to keep that piece,” she continues. “I took Rest a While to a show and was terrified of it selling, so I put the price ridiculously high. And then someone inquired about it! I was so worried, and wondering what I should do. Then, I realized, I couldn’t have it for sale. That was fine, I just took it home.”
Morling’s path to ceramics, and her longstanding porcelain mood, is the result of a gradual evolution. Her frustrations with dyslexia, combined with unsympathetic educators, instilled an early preference for visual over literary expression. “I wanted to do art, and I was absolutely rubbish at everything else,” she says. Morling tried to bind those artistic yearnings to a more stable career by attending a master’s program to become an art therapist. A ceramics class derailed that option, however, as she found a calling in the medium quite unlike anything she’d previously experienced. “Clay is so hypnotic, so tactile. It’s just satisfying. I’ve tried using metal, wood, fabric, everything. I don’t know any other material that acts like that,” she says.
Whatever success she’s enjoyed, however, was earned by struggle in her nascent years of study and error. “My first attempts at art left me feeling like I couldn’t speak,” she says, “and the whole time I’m trying to find this language. But once I found it, I very quickly became fluent, and could finally say what I wanted.”
Her early ceramics were comprised of roughly-made vessels and scenes. These were glazed, heavy-looking pieces that lacked the refinement and expressiveness to get across what Morling hoped to visualize. Exactly what that was, however, remained elusive. Looking for inspiration lead her to realize that many of the artworks that struck her as emotive and effective were executed by students at the Royal College of Art in London. She applied, was accepted, and began the search for herself in earnest.
“Someone will ask me what a piece is about, and then I’ll really start to understand it. I don’t really get it until after I make it.”
Someone will ask me what a piece is about, and then I’ll really start to understand it. I don’t really get it until after I make it.”
My first attempts at art left me feeling like I couldn’t speak… and the whole time I’m trying to find this language. But once I found it, I very quickly became fluent…”
Encouragement from a mentor at the Royal College lead her to putting aside ceramics for a time to concentrate on drawing. “I thought there was a certain way that I should be drawing,” says Morling. “I did a lot of emotional drawing, and I took that with me to the ceramics studio and put my drawing on the work.” She experimented a bit with these first pieces, specifically by adding color. Some early medical tools, for example, feature daubs of blood. The effect was all wrong. What she wished would come across as evocative and stylized read like an attempt at realism that seemed off. She traded the colors for an inky black and finally found her voice with a style that she has since dubbed “3D Drawing.”
“I felt very free,” Morling says. “From then on, I started to explore my own personal narrative. It’s just developed from there.”
3D Drawing has been at the core of Morling’s artistic practice for roughly a decade. The striking method might seem familiar, especially due to its ubiquity across art-fanatic accounts on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter, as well as for Hi-Fructose readers, in the visual similarities it bares to the cardboard work of Dosshaus, featured in Volume Forty-Seven. Morling, however, is neither content to remain unchanging nor overeager to upend her established practice. “I never made life easy for myself,” she says.
Her overall goal for the near future is to, simply, keep developing. Experiments with color form an immediate goal. Dabbling in color has resulted in sections of newer porcelain sculptures being painted with intense oil pigment. The results have proved mixed. The process is promising, overall, but the oils themselves are so slow to dry that it is proving a logistical sticking point. Another resolution involves slowing down.
“As my career started taking off, I would do long days without a break,” Morling says. “But I look back on that habit and wonder if that lost a bit of finesse from some of my art. I look back at some of the work and see a few slight finishes that could be better. But we’ll see. Maybe that was a really important part of the work, and how it was meant to look. I don’t know yet. I just have this sense of development that I want to achieve. I’m really happy for it to take its time.”*
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