The art of ceramics is so entwined with Chinese culture that porcelain is also called ‘China’ in English. China is well known in the world for porcelain and the city of Jingdezhen is spoken about with a passion in the ceramic industries and the contemporary ceramic art scene. Jingdezhen is the most renowned centre for global ceramics, with the highest quality porcelain in China. From many blogs and conversations regarding this city, people say it is not a tourist city. It’s an intense city, vibrating with ageless rhythm; where life there exists as suspended between ancient layers of history and modern times. Day and night fires are put out, burning mud into utility and art, the air is full of industrial grit and transformative ideals.
I want to be charged up by the city, visit master potters with years of experience and a desire for a fresh start. I want to talk to educational activists, philosophers and artists and walk through the gritty streets and porcelain markets. I hear ceramic artists exchange stories of Jingdezhen, as a place to center yourself in this world full of ceramics, where porcelain in all forms is constantly caught in your vision. It’s seen stacked on bikes that are travelling through back alleys, huge vases are packed with straw, displayed, wet mounds turning, throwing and embracing, focussing, firing, glistening dust and glossed finishes, all tended to with care. I’ve watched countless YouTube videos and read endless books and blogs. I aim to experience these places first hand to further understand how porcelain can be used in a contemporary context.
Before I reach Jingdezhen I will tell you my plans and experiences prior to travelling. At times my blog will be intense with some disturbing imagery, so this is a warning. I hope you will all follow my thoughts and experiences.
A few days before travelling Hong Kong I sit in a sexual health clinic and I am shaking. For those of you who know me, life has dealt me some rough cards recently. In the waiting room the news headline is ‘Crash jet made sharp turns and plunged’. Greece’s defense minister stated that the Egypt Air flight from Paris to Cairo plunged into the Mediterranean sea. I’m really nervous. I write the reason for visiting the sexual health clinic in the box. My partner is a heroin addict. The relevance of this will all make sense later.
How did it come to this? I have tried to detox him several times after finding out. I had no idea and was then going in to teach, it was heavy. My mother is also a heroin addict. None of it makes any sense. How can this drug be so involved in my life, yet I am not a heroin addict? I feel alone and in a really dark headspace, fearing travelling alone for three months around Asia.
My mother has been in hospital, a heroin overdose and she has cancer. They won’t give her chemotherapy because she won’t stop using opiates and drinking. My partner is deep in a raging smack and crack habit, drinking and angry at life. I feel like I’m abandoning them and they don’t even care. People say subconsciously I chose to be with a heroin addict to try and understand my mother issues, some Freudian thing. Who knows.
It’s a sunny day here in the UK and I’m full of anxiety about being apart from him, not knowing if he is ok or even if he has woken up alive. Every day I am apart from him, lets call him E, and my mother; I dread the idea of them laying dead in their beds. Somewhere along the line I have forgotten who I am and what I like doing. People say travelling will be good for that.
After graduating from Goldsmiths, from the Fine Art MFA course in 2011, I partied hard in the London art scene. After a good run of exhibitions I got funding to go to the US for three months. The British Council and the Arts Council England funded a solo show at INOVA, Institute of Visual Arts, Milwaukee, US, through the Artists’ International Development Fund. This was a part of the National Council of Education for the Ceramic Arts 48th Annual Conference, US. I had developed a love of porcelain from studying at Goldsmiths. In my practice, ceramic elements play a big part; they reference the delicate and precious nature of the self in the domestic and in society at large. After the US I travelled around Europe in a van with my boyfriend at the time. Through Skype, I managed to secure a job as a Fine Art Lecturer at Norwich University of the Arts, while I was at a music festival in Croatia!
I moved into a lovely apartment. It was quiet and calm, I didn’t know anyone but life felt so full of potential. I developed a huge drinking problem over the years and it was only since I was in the flat alone and the partying was over, that I realised. I was drinking and smoking and pacing around the big lonely apartment. I’d sit at the window smoking, looking into the YMCA opposite and remember being younger. There is always so much drama over there, lots of arguments in the street. I began to feel really low and out of control of my drinking. I’d sit at the window, holding onto the ledge to stop myself jumping from the 3rd floor. This continued for some time until I looked up a local Alcoholics Anonymous group and ran across the park to my first meeting. As I said earlier, all this personal outpouring will make sense later.
I met E at AA. He had told me he had a past with heroin but he was clean and working a program. I wanted someone to live a clean and sober life with, going for Norfolk country walks and making strawberry jam with. We connected immediately and he moved in. He was a Stone Mason and a musician. It was perfect. My huge art studio, apartment and work were all 10 minutes from each other. You never get that in London. We didn’t own a TV, watched films, lay under blankets, had baths together in candlelight and wrote songs together.
Then he told me he had been using heroin and life went completely nuts. It felt like he had a mistress. I moved him out a couple of times after trying to emotionally support him and several detox attempts. It took over our lives. I was watching him inject and then going to work to teach. I had no control over the situation so he had to go. This left me with huge debts from supporting him, rent and bills. All before the big trip to China. How could porcelain, heroin, the UK and Hong Kong all be connected? I started to read about the Opium Wars.
Having secured funding for a performance and film in Hong Kong, Wing Platform funded by Firstsite Gallery in Colchester, I then secured funding from the A-N Travel Bursary for the second half of this research trip to travel to historical cities. My work contract in Norwich ended. I packed up my flat into a storage container, what was left unbroken from the chaos, and left.
At the airport E messaged me asking for a bank transfer for food. I will not give him any more money. I was hoping he was getting in contact to wish me good luck. The flight was long. I sat next to a Chinese lady called ‘Fun’ who works in a home for the elderly in Wales. She was going to visit her Mum in China. We are planning to go to the Chinese Opera. I hope that actually happens. She was reading a news article about the plane crash. The lady on the other side of me worked for a print publishing company. She was flying out to China to live in a print factory for the upcoming illustrated version of a Harry Potter book. She talked about staying in dorms and being woken up three or four times a night to check the next batch of prints. I felt calm around these women.
I watched three movies, The Martian with Matt Damon, The Room and a Peggy Guggenheim documentary. I was surprised that was on there. She really was an incredible woman. Almost single-handedly, she introduced American Abstract Expressionism to Europe, culminating in her last-minute rescue of her personal collection of Nazi-termed “degenerate art” as the Second World War began. Her father died in the Titanic. The Martian was about Matt Damon trying to survive on Mars alone. For the first time in a long time I was aware of smiling to myself. He was surviving on his own, happy at times. I was aware of this cheesy parallel to my life and I revelled in it. The two ladies either side of me were asleep, in fact most people on the plane were asleep. I had this odd sensation of the world passing by underneath my feet. I looked out of the window and the moon was like a bright pink spotlight. Excitedly I woke the two ladies and we clambered over each other trying to take a photo that would do the scene justice. The photos looked like printing errors. I ordered kosher food as it felt nostalgic and usually it’s the best option in hospitals.
The plane landed at HK International Airport and I said goodbye to my flight companions. I had an overwhelming desire to smoke and needed to get outside. The curator for my show and a good friend Craig Cooper had given me clear instructions on how to get to him. As soon as I got outside, I felt the intensity of the heat. It felt like a fan heater blowing straight in my face. I bought an Octopus card, which is the equivalent to an Oyster card, except you can use it to purchase things almost everywhere in Hong Kong. Craig describes it as a cash card with anonymous credentials.
I get the Airport Express train to Hong Kong Station, which was spacious and the air conditioning was blasting out. I arrived at HK station and got confused about where I was supposed to meet Craig. It was packed. I walked really far away from where we were supposed to meet and by chance we bumped into each other! It was reassuring to see a familiar friendly face. We took the MTR to Macau HK Ferry terminal. It was busy with colourfully dressed groups of Mainland Chinese tourists everywhere.
It was here that I realised I was going to be stared at a lot during my trip. People stare and don’t look away when you look up. We got the ferry, went through customs and were greeted by uniformed ladies promoting the Casino shuttle buses.
I got some cigarettes. Forget the usual rotten lungs warnings, here it’s all about vanity.
The lift in apartment building felt like one you’d find in a London Mayfair hotel. We arrived at Craig’s apartment and I met his girlfriend Isobel and their housemates. The view from their balcony is of Mainland China across the Pearl River delta.
We discussed the different laws and currencies separated politically by the residue of colonialism and physically by a small section of water. There’s a large pool connected to the apartments and lots of construction going on. We ate some spicy food and went to sleep.
There are some interesting construction projects going on.
24.05.2016
In the morning I showed Craig some raw footage of my mother, E and an encounter with some radical born again Christians, who work with addicts and the homeless in Norwich. My good friend and artist Patrick Goddard helped me to film some difficult scenes in London.
I also filmed Craig and Isobel’s terrapins HaHa and WaWa. Coincidently it was national turtle day.
Craig said what really struck him was the contrast between the show he has just curated, being about bodies, architecture and space and my work, was so different. He said the footage showed how addiction can make you withdraw from society and how politics and information itself can strangle its view and relationship. Although it’s still essentially a body, or a space as a body, being manipulated by a person or a ‘thing’.
It’s very accessible because of the way I approached it. I’ve permitted an access into a world that many of us can only imagine. We talked about the ideas of editing and the questions that the work could be proposing in connection to a British Artist exhibiting in HK. I am not shying away from HK being a former colony of the UK but considering the impacts of the past, in relation to now. The sensitive approach to filming gives enough space for the viewer to enter the work without making the viewer feel pity or sorrow. It also isn’t about it being exploitative, stylised or an egotistical project. We are still in discussion. What I am really doing is trying to avoid all the inevitable foreclosures that come with handling a such sensitive subject matters. I talked about Allan Kaprow’s ‘Happenings’ and Craig spoke about Harmony Korine’s films.
This afternoon we got the bus to Macau Central to Grand Lisboa. Then we went to the historical part of central Macau and ate some dumplings and waffles with peanut sauce from a stall. We went to the ruins, a remaining facade of St Pauls Cathedral, which is a big tourist attraction. Portuguese architecture, paving, houses and churches are mainly located here.
We began talking about superstitious architecture. The building below is meant to look like an orchid but actually it represents knives hanging over the doorways. This is representative of the plethora of symbolism in Feng shui used with sinister undertones, a blade that will cut off your money in the Casino. There are lots of different versions of this in Chinese culture employed by the casinos that bring them good fortune and customer bad fortune. It’s subtle and disguised by seductive extravagance.
Gambling is forbidden in mainland China because of communism, apart from In Macau. You can gamble in HK but only horseracing. We visited The Vanetian casino, which is the largest casino in Macau. I secretly filmed inside and they asked for my passport, which meant they thought I looked under the age of 21!
This casino is venice themed and feels like a set from the Truman show. It’s open 24 hours a day and has no windows, so it looks like daytime all the time. This is to disorientate the customers. It is filled with high end retail shops so customers can spend their money immediately in the complex. There are gondolas with Chinese opera singers entertaining the customers.
Their marketing campaign has a photo of David Beckham looking pensive in a gondola. Then we had dinner in a Thai restaurant. Everything is about Feng Shui here, the restaurant tied bags of water to the railings by the river outside. This is to bring good fortune. We got a free Uber car home.
25.05.2016
Jetlag hit me today so the day really started in the afternoon.
The weather changes so quickly as you move across a small amount of space, from a diffused filter to HD. Everything is covered in a layer of pollution today, I can hardly see the buildings opposite, it’s as if a thin sheet of tracing paper is being held up in front of me. The sun doesn’t look real, it looks like a projection and I can stare straight at it. The Asian moon looks like a reflection of a moon on water. Stepping outside onto the balcony feels like the moment you step out of the changing rooms and into a heated indoor swimming pool.
In the afternoon we popped over the border into Zhuhai, Mainland China for food and to pick up a TV. We walked across the border and explored the area. In the market we saw rows of large decapitated, fish heads having spasms due to their nerves being severed. After we crossed back over the border Isobel gave me a lift on her bike. It felt incredible, like a moment in a film with the hot fragrant Asian air brushing past us.
When I got back to Macau, E called for the first time in ages to let me know that he has started his script. Hopefully this means he will be clean at some point soon. I need to focus on what makes me feel good as I feel traumatised by life with an addicts.
