(Sculpture pair, 2022) porcelain, paper porcelain, concrete (jesmonite), steel, satin ribbon, butcher’s hook
I created this work for the Jerwood Art Fund Makers Open, 2021. The piece was shown at Jerwood Space in London, and then toured to Newlyn Gallery in Cornwall, and Aberdeen Art Gallery. This was my first foray into ceramics. (For the curator’s catalogue text and interview, see below.)
The piece explores what our current accentuation of identity means, and revisits anxieties around the hinging of self to identity that crop up in my work. It suggests that ideas that can be a force for good can also be tyrannical, if balance is lost.
It is a very personal response to recent tropes in the political climate, particularly the quasi-religious sanctifying of identity. It’s also a meditation on how an idea that can be a force for good in some contexts, such as the coming together under identity banners in the civil rights movements of the C20th, can also metastasise, for example, into the reduction of humans to avatars of single identity characteristics, in today’s more destructive context. It’s about balance, and balance lost, and context.
It’s a pair of sculptures, A Fall From Grace I and II. They use the cone shape that pops up so much in my sculptural vocabulary. The title refers partly to the fall from liberalism to illiberalism, as well as my own fall from grace for refusing bad ideas. Such things are a test of ethical mettle.
The first piece is a sort of ‘fountain’ – each rod on the fountain starts with a delicately hand-built, very thin fragile paper porcelain cone. These are individual. Authentic. These segue into repeated cast cones – identical by nature of the process of slip casting. The reductive replication of ‘identity’. Three of the rods begin to be pulled down at the end as the cones become half porcelain and half concrete. Finally, an outlier rod has a whole concrete cone dragging it almost to the floor.
I suppose I’m trying to convey a good idea gone bad, something ossifying or taken too far, as well as the confinement and repetition of identity. All the rods ‘bob’ and have a sense of instability in the changing air currents in the gallery. The satin ribbons (in both pieces) are a visceral blood red, whilst the bows mimic the smiley triteness that so often conceals authoritarianism beneath the surface.
The narrative then moves to the second sculpture, which is a large concrete cone suspended precariously, almost on the floor, by a ribbon from a butcher’s hook, creating tension in the viewer. It is balanced above a tiny vulnerable hand-built paper porcelain cone, invading its space; eliciting a sense of threat. This part feels like a self-portrait – but also taps into a new collective fear of speaking-out from beneath looming bullying totalitarianism. We have entered an era where merely speaking the truth is a radical act.
You can listen to me In Conversation with Inaya Folarin Iman, founder of The Equiano Project, discussing this piece, and the themes around identity from our event at Jerwood Space in February 2022.
Here’s the catalogue text written by the lovely curators at Jerwood:
“A Fall from Grace is a sculptural installation which uses geometric language and repetitive processes to explore contemporary identity politics, proposing that ideas that can be a force for good can also become tyrannical when balance is lost.
“At its core are two contrasting materials that are new to Anna Berry’s practice: porcelain, a fragile almost translucent ceramic, and concrete, a robust composite commonly used in the construction of buildings. In A Fall from Grace I, there is a gradual progression from individually hand-formed porcelain cones at the centre of the work, to uniform cast shapes as the concrete pulls down the tendrils of the sculpture. A Fall from Grace II sees one large concrete cone precariously balanced above a single porcelain piece, ready to fall at any moment.
“In highlighting the tension between these contrasting materials, Berry reflects on balance, power and precarity. How can things at opposite ends of the spectrum co-exist within the same structure?”
Here is an interview with Harriet Cooper, (then) Head of Visual Arts at Jerwood Arts:
With many thanks to: David Gilbert, Pangaea Sculpture Centre, Rui Pignatelli, Clive Doherty, and Susan Watkins.