Man-Handling
An online exhibition
by Will Martin
with Paul Morris Gallery
To purchase works in the show, please contact @paulmorrisgallery
About Man-Handling
By Paul Morris, Gallerist and Co Founder of the Armoury Show
Man-Handling, the solo show by Cape Town born, London based artist Will Martin, includes both ceramic objects and records of the performative dinners. These Supper Clubs have been produced over the past year with curatorial partner Davy Pittoors.
Martin’s art making divides into two practices. He creates ceramic art objects, some of which can also function as traditionally useful vessels, and performative events where he includes these objects. By utilizing his art in this way, he brings to the fore the timeless challenge that confronts any artist working with ceramics,- art versus design. For Martin, by infusing the works with personal meaning and identity, the answer is clear that it is both. A vase, for example, can be an aesthetic sculptural art piece as well as an object that holds flowers.
Martin turned to his own experience as a gay man and artist for meaning and content in his art. Gay men grow up in heteronormative spaces, traditions and behavior. Martin seeks to reclaim for example the simple act of a family dinner - where as a boy Martin felt the most comforted in his childhood home. Here Martin jettisons traditional dinnerware patterns for hand painted phalluses or text that refer to homosexual slang for alpha males. It's a very direct way to start creating domestic spaces with iconography specifically related to a gay sexual and political reality. Martin also confronts this through abstraction. In the case of the moon vases many are made with clay foraged from a famous gay cruising ground in Hampstead Heath.
Martin and Pittoors have produced supper club dinners at both the Museum of the Home in London and in Martin’s backyard, home and studio. The Museum and Martin’s home are the perfect venues to directly question the meanings and evolving definitions for what is a home, whether it be heteronormative, gay or queer. Meals by their nature encourage sharing and thus supper club participants become integral to the experience and dialogue. “I would say it is about objects as tools for care, the importance of a chosen family and the freedom to make your own queer associations”, Martin explains.
The ‘Chosen Family’ Dinner: A non-normative insight into queer homemaking.
By Barney Pau, Writer and Artist
The sharing of a meal with a stranger also elicits a social contract between host and guest. Both can expect mutual respect: the former in return for their hospitality; the latter through their invitation. From Will’s perspective, as a queer man, this is doubly important. Welcoming a stranger into your space takes implicit trust after a lifetime of social exclusion. This equality pervades every aspect of GAZE. In spite of this being a talk, Davy has gone to lengths to ensure that everyone is seated equally, and his discussion with Marc is open to evolve at any time into a wider conversation. As the evening plays out, it begins to feel like a raucous family dinner as everyone relaxes, and their stories flow forth.
Most of us are familiar with the format of a traditional family dinner. Whether nightly or weekly, riotous or pious; these meals are synonymous with domestic life. The traditional family dinner has become a symbol of household stability, centring on parental pillars and often patriarchally inclined. Bread is broken across generations, and the experience of age can exchange wisdom with the awareness of youth. However, for many queers, mealtimes can be places of misunderstanding; whether benign or malign, and the wisdom we receive around is often misguided.Social dining is recognised by philosophers such as Jean Soler and William Robertson Smith to break social barriers, and engender companionship between strangers. Indeed, the very word ‘companion’—from the Latin com- ‘together with;’ and panis ‘bread’—is ‘one with whom you break bread.’ The democracy that arises from social dining has been celebrated throughout history. From the Ancient Classical tradition of shared feasting; to France’s post-Revolutionary communal dinners to celebrate their ‘fraternity:’ shared food makes for the most savoured meals.
Queering Space
by Davy Pittoors, Independent Curator
Excerpt from A Great Gay Book, out 21st May 2024
Davy Pittoors: What does queering space mean to you?
Will Martin: I suppose I’d have to break that question up into what I consider to be domestic and
how one might queer it. I think that I’m currently in this search of domestic space without
necessarily having had a very immersive experience of it previously. At the moment I’m trying
to make a home, but I’ve been trying to do that for many years, and I don't know if I’ve
necessarily achieved that. Don't get me wrong, my parents obviously made their respective
homes very well. But what I’ve taken from growing up is that mealtimes were when I felt most
at home. We moved house quite a lot and it was usually rented. There was never a sense of a
permanent family home and I don't even know if that's possible for me to have. I've been living
in my current place for about four years and I'm getting itchy feet; when I first got to London, I
was moving every six months. I’ve always been much more comfortable in studios or
semi-industrial spaces than in actual homes, which have always felt a bit cloying and
claustrophobic. But when I do have a domestic space at my disposal, I’m constantly rearranging
it because that's kind of what you do in studio spaces–constant tweaking for what you need at
that moment.
Ceramics, Sex, and Infrastructure:
A Queer Erotics of Urbanism
By Max J. Andrucki, Associate Professor at Temple University, USA
Regarding his current work, Martin’s approach to pottery as a vessel of his own intentional sublimation has shifted: “I’m trying to not sublimate at the moment, I’m trying to not dissociate. I’m trying to stay very present. With the wheel you have to be present. No chatting. If I’m not present and paying attention, this isn’t going to go well. You have to perform the movement or else it’s not going to work. So it’s the opposite of sublimating in a way.” For his current tableware work, he finds explicit use of representational stylistic elements to be unnecessary. Martin, working on the wheel, notes that clay gives the artist an immediate feedback loop, as the clay responds immediately. The wheel is less forgiving than other methods of making ceramics. As Martin says, “If you do something, it’s there for the rest of the object’s life. So it acts as almost a diagnostic tool for how I feel. It’s just you and this very receptive material. The material itself is very prone to projection. It’s also a great way of forming and communicating identity. People tell me who they are by how they treat the clay.” The objects themselves emerge as erotic infrastructure both through their circulation as craft commodities and through their enfolding into durational performance work that enacts an Orphic world.
By viewing, feeling, holding, passing around, serving food and drink in, and constituting community through queer ceramics, we improvisationally craft the erotic infrastructure that keeps the queer city going. In this sense we can also accept ... Martin’s queer craft’s complicity with and enfolding into practices of urban restructuring internationally. Eros is desublimated, but I do not read these works as utopian totems of sexual liberation, radical economic practice, or declarations of zones of autonomy. Their work orientates us to a new mode of thinking queer embeddedness within the rhythms of the city, in relation to but never outside capitalist modernity. It is a provisional response to the fragility of our refusals, because it congeals circuits of erotic care that sustain us as we gesture our way toward a less repressive sublimation.
Special edition
London Clay Vase, 2023
To celebrate the launch of Man-Handling, we have released a limited edition set of vases which you can purchase directly through the website.
