November 18, 2015 |
The young artist and founder of the experimental ceramics studio Troy Town Art Pottery describes his art as a kind of “composting”.Though a number of his tabletop ceramics feature phallic mushrooms, the London-based Angell doesn’t mean this literally. Rather, it’s the “psychic accretion and then offloading” of a pile-up of idiosyncratic references – from folk culture to cult movies, outsider artists to the material world’s less-considered corners, be that flowerbed design or dogs’ chew toys.
When we speak he’s in the midst of making work for a solo exhibition at Studio Voltaire in London this summer, followed by the British Art Show in October. Germinating in new ceramics and paintings on glass are references to a Wiltshire chalk horse, DM Black’s poem Without Equipment and Bram Stoker’s “unbelievably awful, boring book” Lair of the White Worm. “He took a 10-year break from writing it and seems to have forgotten who the characters were,” he says. “It’s as if the worm has lobotomised them and their psychology totally changes, which structurally is quite interesting. The fact that it was an especially bad book made that stick out brighter.”
Remarks like these suggest that Angell doesn’t approach his material with a fan’s wide eyes, be it his imaginative sources or art mediums. His new ceramics include a ring of what look less like serpents than giant, upright turds, rising like standing stones from a blue pool, and a hunched pelican with a beautiful, drippy, white glaze. In a new painting on glass, a serpent snakes its way through a landscape composed of his familiar tubular forms in mottled mauves and tangerines on black. The references are in there, but transformed into something new and strange.
Angell’s interest in ceramics follows a similar tack. Though he has every edition of Ceramics Review back to 1970, when they covered “sixth form exhibitions”, Troy Town Art Pottery, is an attempt to free the medium from its past. His artist residencies are unschooled, unlike the craft-based practice of traditional ceramics studios. “The whole point is to prevent people being interested just because it’s ceramic,” he says. “To make a system where it’s being treated as sculpture.”
Part of the appeal of ceramics and his paintings, first on Perspex and now glass, in the manner of folk art from Germany and China, is its unpredictable nature, he explains. “I’m working with the mirror image. The paint is flicked on in an accretion so the last colour I put down is the least important. Like ceramics, they can’t be reworked.
“It’s not quite ceding to failure, but trying to cede the image, whether it’s in the ceramic or the painting, to some kind of volatile environment. There are lots of unknowns.”
Aaron Angell’s work is in British Art Show 8, Oct 9-Jan 10, at Leeds Art Gallery, then touring the UK
Image courtesy of the artist and Rob Tuffnell, London
Text by Skye Sherwin, taken from Issue 42 of 10 Men
