- Venue
- Ruthin Craft Centre
- Location
- Wales
Anna Noël’s voice is filling the room. A film of her being interviewed by the curator, Ceri Jones, plays on a loop from a small, wall-hung monitor in the corner of Ruthin Craft Centre’s (RCC) Gallery Two. Sharpening the sound, the acoustics make Noël appear on-edge, discomforted and cornered.
The first of three artists to be shown in The Language of Clay series (a collaboration between RCC and Swansea’s Mission Gallery) Noël is an intriguing choice. For on face value this is pretty straightforward work. Nice, whimsical, mantelpiece-size, earthenware depictions of animals in easy-on-the-eye muted tones. And yet juxtaposed, as they are, against the experiences Noël is recounting, the figures take on a wholly different aspect. So much so that the forms and Noel’s voice (we never actually see the artist on screen) become indivisible.
Noël’s series of works made using press mould bases, such as Lady on a Wolf and Man with Beard, reflect the automata of the Cabaret Mechanical Theatre, artists like Paul Spooner and Keith Newstead, with their squared–off, contained environments featuring characters endlessly moving through some sort of inner or outer metamorphosis. By contrast Noël’s characters are static, like her Lady from Riga and Lady from Bute, captured forever in a moment of splendid peculiarity. As the title suggests Noël’s opus is all about stories. Her voice is telling us that Edward Lear is an influence. ‘His work is quite eccentric’, Noël is saying, ‘that childhood belief that anything can happen…like riding a tiger or a pig’.
For all the maturation of her methods, process and evident knowledge of ceramic folk art tradition, the umbilical cord of Noël’s childhood has clearly not been severed. While studying for an MA at The Royal College of Art, Noël struggled with the College’s interminable demands for explanations. ‘I couldn’t think out the words’, she says. Finally, unable to stand what she called the ‘claustrophobia’ of London she chose to complete the work for her final show at home. There is something incredibly touching about such candidness. One wonders if, like the Austrian illustrator Lizbeth Zwerger, now much celebrated for her exquisite depictions of Grimm’s tales, Noël’s struggle was more about a lack of appreciation for what some might see as her backward-looking oeuvre against the cutting-edge paradigms of the RCA.
There is a kind of doggedness, a digging-in of heels with makers like Noël. Determined to nurture her style, her mythology, her iconography, rather like the potter John Maltby, and at the other end of the scale, papier maché artist Julie Arkell, there is a constant, seemingly unchanging re-visiting of theme. Never twee, initially press moulded, individually modelled and then brushed with washes of slip and oxide, Noël’s stock of goats, horses, dogs, cats, foxes and hares, their eyes blacked-out, look inward, self-possessed and acquiescent, tilting their heads in bemused enquiry. The human figures, astride horses, tigers, pigs have a rigidity, an awkwardness, almost a two-dimensionality, that the beasts do not. ‘I find I naturally bond with animals’, Noël is saying, ‘perhaps if I’d lived on a street with lots of kids around it might’ve been different.’ ‘I needed a companion,’ Noël continues, ‘I had my dog, we’d share our adventures’.
Two middle-aged women walk into the Gallery talking. Continuing their chatter they skim the exhibits, occasionally bending down to read the titles. One of them, with bouffant blonde-hair and a floral-patterned rucksack on her back, keeps letting out a loud guffaw as she encounters each piece.
On face value Telling Tales is pretty straightforward work. But look beyond the surface and, imbued as it is with all the potency of Noël’s skill and vulnerability, you will see that it is not.
