I often explain to students that their work is likely to be most effective if the means of expression are constrained. Strip away the excess, I advise them, and get to the heart of what you are trying to communicate. In contemporary art people might describe this as ‘minimalism’.  ‘Minimal’ doesn’t mean there isn’t much to the idea. The reverse is probably true. The act of editing generally enriches what you are doing, and makes the visual experience more concentrated.

I wanted to demonstrate this idea practically for a book I was working on. I decided to make something with ceramic tableware. I’d been lukewarm about the use of pottery in mosaic. Maybe I even had the odd outburst of anti-pottery evangelism. Mosaic made from tableware so often looks confusing, excessive and frighteningly sharp. There are varied patterns, colours, surfaces, textures and qualities of reflectivity – so many differences that the work becomes hard to read. Chaos threatens to overwhelm expression. And when mosaics made with pottery are easy to read, it is often because they conform to a well-known model  – breaking up a plate and sticking it together again, for example.  I can see the fun in doing it, but I’m not entirely convinced of the appeal of the finished product for anyone other than the maker. Of course you might argue – some do – that chaos is at the vanguard of delight. Exposure to the hitherto jarring allows us gradually to enter a new enlightened state of pleasurable coherence. The incomprehensible becomes beautiful  – like Schoenberg and twelve-tone technique. I don’t know how many Schoenbergs there are amongst us pottery-smashers, but if you are one, I apologise for my prejudice.

So a dislike of tableware in mosaic was the starting point for my experiments. I issued myself with a challenge – show people how to create something that used ceramic tableware and retained visual coherence. I wasn’t really certain it could be done.

My first problem was colour. If I wanted to employ a variety of randomly collected material – things students and friends had given me to use over the years – what would unify them? The answer seemed to lie in flipping the plates and using the backs of them. Plates may have glazes and decoration on their face, but reverse them, and they are generally white. The printed material on the back of the plates – what I thought of at the time as ‘marks’ and would now call ‘backstamps’ – was interesting, and a challenge to combine effectively. How could I get these to read – to become the content of the work? The answer, as I suggested at the opening of this blog, lay in constraint. Use minimal means.

I will expand on this theme tomorrow. In the meantime here is one roundel from the finished work in the Potteries Museum and Art Gallery, from the mecca of ceramic, Stoke-on-Trent.

Not all the young lark about in quite that way. I had some lovely students today, including one young man who is a total beginner. He clutched a plastic bag of pottery sherds and fragments of iridescent glass. Both were still wet, having been collected the previous day from the banks of the Thames.

For centuries, the Thames has been London’s sewer. The banks are shored up with old industrial waste, some of which came from the ‘shawdruck’ (the pottery tip, full of unwanted, broken and faulty ware). I told Ondrej (who is from the Czech Republic) that he was a ‘mudlark’.

In 2010 to be a mudlark is to be a treasure-hunter, but in the nineteenth century it was far from a leisure activity. It was a job, done by society’s desperate and pitiful. Most were children, but some were widows – impoverished women with no means of support – who collected coal from the river-shore and any kind of material they could sell on to other poverty-stricken individuals. In so doing, they took their lives in their hands. The Thames was insanitary. London’s sewers ran straight into it. Nor was it unusual for these wretched individuals to have to pick their way between corpses – both human and animal.

I am embarking on a project ‘Made in England Unearthed.’ Once again, it based on the history of the ceramic industry. It uses both Thames collected ware, and fragments of ceramic found in London gardens. I would be delighted if anyone has anything they would like to contribute to the project. The artist John McLean, who together with his wife Jan, has been an inveterate mudlark, offered me his collection this week, when he phoned to tell us of the sad demise of the artist Ken Noland. Both Matt and John knew Ken, and are very sorry he is no more.

Fragments of ceramic slipware and transfer printed table ware collected by my student Ondrej.

If you would like to hear what I think these principles are, come to my class at the SAMA Conference in Chicago. I am teaching two day long workshops, on the 17th and 18th March.

Dead head, dead beat. Me too.

Gave a long illustrated lecture about principles of design. The students were smiling and nodding in agreement at the points I was making. On the edge of launching into an explanation of allegory in depictions of animals in the medieval world and their form of pictorial expression, I noticed some of my audience had fallen asleep.

Allegory is interesting though. We think of the Middle Ages as entirely separate from the classical world, but they didn’t think like that then. They had to reinterpret the past, and re-understand earlier beliefs from a new Christian perspective. Everything had its place in a cosmic order. So representations of animals – the kind you see in the mosaics at Aquileia, Ganagobie or (to my mind best of all) at Otranto, are not just illustrative, they are full of meaning. Each creature stands for an aspect of the Christian message. A peacock, for example (which had been known in the classical world as a symbol of the afterlife) is given new symbolic meaning by standing for the incorruptible flesh of Christ, and of life eternal. Images of animals were not sentimental, they were potent reminders of the moral order of the world.

Image of Otranto by Adrian Fletcher. I highly recommend you click this link. He has wonderful photographs, and recommendations about where to eat if you visit.

Photo © Adrian Fletcher, www.paradoxplace.com

I recently talked about light to a group of students. One young man, articulate and interested, made it perfectly clear he didn’t have a clue what I was on about. ‘Everything is visible due to the effects of light — you can’t see anything if it isn’t’ he objected. While this may be true, it does slightly miss the point. It’s a bit like noticing that all foods have a flavour, or that all sounds can be musical — an observation you need to harness to go anywhere with it.

The art historian Paul Hills has given scholarly thought to how light works. In the introduction to his masterly book The Light of Early Italian Painting he suggests that an interest in depicted light is a historical anomaly, even if it is one that lasts for a number of centuries. His implication is that before the Renaissance we were not concerned with representing light, and after the Impressionists we lose our interest in it. Paul Hills is uniquely insightful, but on this point I disagree. Surely the fuzzy haloed forms around a typical Rothko ‘portal’ are analogies for represented light, and a great deal of abstraction is concerned precisely with these issues.

Contemporary art is perennially conducting literal re-stagings, in the form of installations, into some of the aesthetic enquiries of modernism. So when a couple of weeks ago I went to a show at the V22 gallery in Dalston, to see a show of work by Fergal Stapleton. I wasn’t surprised to see the gallery itself transformed into a canvas, on which LEDs, an oil slide illuminated by projector, a bare light bulb and shadow casting screens had been mounted. These are today’s three dimensional non-metaphorical analogies for the metaphors for light we see in twentieth century painting.

Image from V22 of work by Fergal Stapleton

This is a picture of my cat by the photographer Louise Haywood-Shiefer. The appeal of the image really comes from the blast of contrast — the black and white of the cat, and the band of brilliant colour given by the mosaic tiles on the left. The colour of the photograph is very reduced and keyed to white.  The white of the cat almost fuses with the white of the background, and it is this that boosts the intensity of her gaze, adds brilliance to the green of her eyes, and increases a sense of the tender pink of her nose. The image is recogniseable, but what you are seeing is a photographic stylisation — the photographer has used the camera to see some things and to exclude others.

I have to teach students that image making is about selection, and about making the selected elements seem to lock together. I can imagine a student — not because any student has ever done it with this image, but because people see in this way all the time — finding this image attractive, and wanting to reproduce it. And my imaginary student might observe that you can see a house through the window. And because the house has yellow bricks, I can imagine them being included, not because they can see them in the image, but because the student knows they are there.  And suddenly the balance of the whole image is utterly thrown, and one clarification of the photograph seems to require another, and on and on until the entire image, with its strange white atmosphere, has entirely vanished, and a new colourful world has appeared, one in which the cat is much less ghostly and gripping.

For more fascinating lessons like this, you will have to buy the book Sonia King and I are writing, when we have finished writing it — which will definitely be soon!