London based ceramics artist William Martin talks about the importance of the work of Elmgreen & Dragset and Theaster Gates on his own practice, along with the book, The Mushroom at the End of the World, by Anna Tsing. This episode was recorded during lock down and there may be small amounts of background noise at time

“In this week's episode, I'll be interviewing artist Will Martin in his home studio in South London. We spent a lovely afternoon together where he showed me his home working space and how he curated his home art collection. We talk about his initial experiments in pottery in South Africa, growing up after apartheid ended and tracing his heritage back to Yorkshire. Part 2 will come out next week.”

Jonathan Munro

Will Martin is a ceramicist born in Cape Town who now lives and works in London. His work explores themes of absence, masculinity, and colonial history. Will apprenticed to master potter John Bauer whilst studying Social Sciences, Anthropology, Art History, and English at the University of Cape Town. From 2014-2015 he was a resident artist at the Florence Trust. Run-Riot caught up with Will to discuss matters of sexual and geographic identity, fragile masculinity and objects of desire around his exhibition at The Smallest Gallery in Soho.

Hi Will, you are currently preparing for your solo show. Could you tell us about the work you’ll be exhibiting?

Sure thing! I'm so excited to be exhibiting on Dean Street with The Smallest Gallery in Soho. We're using my ceramic and textile pieces to create a domestic environment that can be voyeuristically seen from the street. We used the listed Georgian Window as a starting point and decorated the room with Adam's Style swags made from chains, and period furniture. The room feels lived in, and is suggestive of the person who lives there. The character and title of the display ‘Liam’ evolved out of this milieu. We know he's in his 50s, has been living in Soho for 30 years, collects art, books and ceramics, and is being evicted in two months time by the council.

I can't thank the curators Philip Levine and Andreia Costa enough for working with me over the past 6 months to develop this site specific installation. The gallery manager Moira Rizopoulos has been great facilitating the exhibition and The Garage Soho have been so kind letting us install in their window. We also have been lucky to receive in-kind item support from local area brands Cubitts, Frame, Set and Match, Blacks Club, and Paragon Service Point, that gives a local feel of community engagement, as well as light support from Santa & Cole and Gallery Velorose, where I had my solo show OBJECT / IMAGE last summer.

You were born and raised in post-apartheid South Africa. How did this affect your identity as a boy, and later as an artist?

The thing to keep in mind is that homosexuality only stopped being illegal in 1994 when Apartheid ended. And that the Constitution that followed explicitly protect the rights of people no matter their sexuality, gender or colour. So I came of age in the new South Africa, but was born in the old. All my teachers, elders and boyfriends had been subject to the Apartheid State and conscription, but there was also this vibrancy and optimism about what SA could become. My education was deeply Post-Colonial as you can imagine, as was the art being produced and exhibited. There was a focus on the underlying economic forces behind exploitation both locally and internationally, and it's here that I base my understanding of power relations. Follow the money. Everything has to be paid for, even if you're not paying for it.

There is a recurring motif of chains and in a larger sense of struggle within the material presence of your work. Can you talk a little about that?

I started making porcelain chains as a way of talking specifically about the fragility of South African masculinity. Porcelain is very hard, but very brittle, and doesn't deal well with shock. Growing up I always experienced a cognitive dissonance between my surroundings and my interior world. Perhaps that's another reading of the contradictory way I use my materials. And then there's the BDSM component that chains inevitably invoke; see Žižek bellow.

How does gender identity inform your craft?

I identify as a cisgender man, using him/his as my pronouns. I've always used art as a way of coming to terms with my sexuality, and a part of that is poking fun at the hyper masculine, internalised homophobia of gay culture. I fall prey to it myself sometimes, not so secretly wishing to be a lumberjock crossfitter at least once a day. My decision to work in craft materials and processes came in my teenage years as a way of lashing out at the expectations of my all-boys-school-sport-fanaticism. I basically started making pottery 'cause I didn't want to play rugby.

You work in the Bussey Building in Peckham. How long have you been based in South London and how would you describe your relationship with the place?

I've been based in Peckham for almost three years now. I'm very lucky to share a studio with Feix and Merlin Architects in the Bussey Building and live on the same road as my second studio at The Kiln Rooms. I love the area, and I've never eaten as well anywhere else in London. A wrap from Salas is a must. Peckham Rye reminds me of being on Long Street in Cape Town so it's home away from home. I get all my sewing supplies from the tailors on the Rye, and every other material or component from Khan's. In the winter I planted clay seed bombs all over Peckham and it's made me feel even closer to the area watching them bloom.

I believe that you studied literature - are there books or writers who have particularly influenced your practice over the years?

Yes, I received an M.Litt from the University of Glasgow through a joint program with Christie's Education. 'The Plague of Fantasies' by Slavoj Žižek was a defining book for both me and my thesis, giving me an entrance point to Lacan's writings on loss. From my University of Cape Town days I'd say J M Coetzee's 'Disgrace' was a kick in the gut that I'll never forget. His acetic writing taught me the importance of editing. But it was probably 'Dinotopia' by James Gurney that showed me as a kid that you could make whole worlds through story telling.

Finally, tell us about an object that is particularly important to you.

I would say an object that's on my mind right now is a gold earring that my Dad posted over from SA recently. He received it during the Single Handed Round the World BOC yatch race when he traversed the Cape Horn of South America. As a naval officer he wasn't allowed to have piercings, so he never wore it. I think I may create a performance for it in the near future.

How did you get started creating ceramics? Were you always interested in becoming an artist? 

Ceramics has always been my first love. I’ve wanted to be an artist ever since I started potting as a child. At certain points studying Dinosaurs or Dolphins was a top priority, but I think those were just phases. I made sure I did Art at least 4 times a week throughout High School. That way I wouldn’t have to play the 2 mandatory sports a year my all Boys School demanded. We each rebel in our own way. 

I took quite a roundabout route to becoming a full time artist, deciding to study Art history, Anthropology and English Litt. instead of going to Art School. After my Masters in Curating I thought I wanted to enter the world of Auction Houses and Galleries, but after a year of curating exhibitions with my partner, I think we both agreed that what I really wanted to be was exhibiting, rather than curating.  

Who taught you how to be a ceramicist, or were you self-taught?

I started doing ceramics at the age of 9 with Jennifer Franstisek in Cape Town. I stayed with her for 9 years, and she formed the very basis of my practice. We studied the pottery from a different culture every year. Her children went to a Waldorf school and I think she took a lot of inspiration from that style of teaching. She was very gentle, generous and understanding.  

After finishing High School I did a 5 year apprenticeship with John Bauer. It was a very intense and fun time, running round Cape Town  in his battered car full of fossils, doilies and artifacts. Going with him to flee markets taught me enormously about material culture and old production techniques. These trips really prepared me for my cataloguing exams at Christie’s Education! 

John is a Master of Porcelain, he showed me how to push the material to its limits. He wanted me to develop my own style rather than learn his production techniques. In fact, he used to lock me out of his private studio when he was using his top-secret methods! If you want to learn how to make a pot I think volunteering in a pottery is the best way to go about it. Potter’s are amazing folk, if they’re able to help you, they usually will.

What are your inspirations? How do you get ideas for new projects? How did you first start making ceramic chains?

The 60s slogan “The personal is political” always spoke to me growing up. I felt that I didn’t have the right to talk about other people’s issues, as I hadn’t lived them, so I looked at my own experience as symptomatic. I like to look for the moments in history that explain how we got to where we are. Why am I speaking English? Why couldn’t my Mom go to University? Where were the components for my phone mined? These are the questions with which I address history, to understand where I fit in. ‘Why’ and ‘F*ck You’ are the words that run through my head most often.   

I seem to mostly make work about my relationships with men, both specifically and in general. 

I started making the ceramic chains while on Residency at the Florence Trust. I wanted to talk about the way men can be very strong, but also very fragile. While growing up in South Africa in the 90s and 00s, I thought that the ways I was expected to be a man were harmful to me and the people around me. Making an edition of the chain means that I can extend that conversation into the wider world. It’s a very tactile object and it reflects light in such a specific way that people can’t help but engage with it and the wearer. 

How do your hobbies influence what you make?

I wish I had hobbies! Everytime I pick one up I end up turning it into a job. My Boyfriend took me on a ferments course and I almost turned my kitchen into a Kimchi factory. I’m hoping this obsessive behavior pays off in my Summer Exhibition at Velorose in London. 

My latest hobby is sewing my own suits, but of course that’s found its way into my practice. It was great learning about different fabrics, and naturally I wanted to make my own surface designs. So now I’m doing spray paint and ink paintings on calico, and cutting them up to make garments. If my Mom hadn’t bought me a sewing class for Christmas, I probably wouldn’t be making this body of work or even be painting again. 

What's your favorite thing about sharing your art with others?   

I love the stories people tell me when they see my work. I think being able to connect with people and have real conversations about their experiences is the most rewarding part of what I do. I also just like doing Show and Tell. It’s so gratifying to say, “I made this and this is what I was thinking when I made it”. 

Installing the work is important to me, because it’s the moment that all these object I’ve made become The Art. Everything snaps into focus as you finish the last pieces of this giant puzzle that’s been in your head for months. Sharing my work with other people is also great because after talking to someone in a show I’ll be like, “Oooh, that’s what that’s about”. Always write down the references people make when they come to your shows, there’s so much to learn from your audience.      

What's been your biggest challenge?

I’m a pretty all or nothing kind of guy. 
So I’m not very good at balance. 

And that’s probably my biggest challenge right now. Fortunately I have a boyfriend who’s kindly trying to get me to look after myself. I need to improve my stamina and endurance if I’m going to be making good work into my 80s. The way to do that is to lead a more balanced life, and look after the basics; food, sleep, exercise. 

What has been your biggest lesson?  

I’ve also learnt that, just because you don’t feel good at something, doesn’t mean you’re bad at it. It takes time and experience to learn what your strengths and weaknesses are. Don’t write yourself off too easily. I believe that I’m terrible at administration and technology, but in reality I’m adequate at it, but because it doesn’t feel good I assume I’m doing it wrong. Maybe I just get too much joy from pottery so I assume doing something well feels good! The latest lesson was to stop treating myself like an employee. Just cause you’re self employed doesn’t mean you get to treat yourself like shit instead of a boss. 

What's been your best advice you've been given?

“Go to London”

Do you have any exhibitions coming up? How did they come about? 

I’m really excited to say that I’ll be having two Solo exhibitions in London this Summer. 

The first will be at Velorose, and the second will be at St Saviour's Church where I did the Florence Trust Residency. These shows will be extensions of each other, but will both be site specific. 

The Velorose show will be looking at the relationship between the Object and the Image, with more representational work than I have previously exhibited. The walls are made of a beautiful untreated poplar plywood, and I’m using this material as the starting point for the new work.  Printmaking may feature strongly as I feel a print is halfway between an image and an object, as well as the transition point between the two. I’ll be inlaying the artworks into the walls of the gallery, and using the gallery walls to produce some of the work. I’m feeling inspired yet vulnerable, as there’s nothing to hide behind with a solo show. It’s all you. 

The St. Saviours show will respond to the Arts and Crafts Style Church. Built in 1865, it is Grade I listed and retails all the original hand painting and architectural details. I’ll be suspending 4, 8 meter long porcelain chains beneath the central dome of the church, creating a mirrored and inverted version. Suspending a chain from 2 points creates a catenary arch, which has been used to build arches, domes, and potter’s kilns since the Renaissance. Gaudi's Cathedral in Barcelona is probably the best known example of this method. This show is being made possible by the amazing independent curator Ashlee Conery, who I met while I was on residency.  

I’m also planning a group exhibition with Abigail Schama in a London graveyard in October. We’ll be talking about Women’s labour, which can seem invisible at time. I’m making a body of work about my mom’s X-Rays, which are a vivid illustration of the literal nuts and bolts that are keeping her worn body together. I wanted to show people how determined and hardworking she, she’s an absolute role model. I think it’s really important to be self motivated, and to produce your own temporary exhibitions. That’s how I met David Rosenberg from Velorose, who will be putting on my Solo this summer. Abigail suggested we invite David as a guest curator, and one thing led to another. 

Acknowledgements 

I’d like to thank Chris Parkes Photography for being so supportive of my practice. He’s taken such wonderful photographs for me, and they’ve made a world of difference to my career. 

I’d also like to thank Jennifer Frantisek, who was like a second Mother to me. She passed away last year and I would like to take this opportunity to honor what she taught me. I would say that Jenny and pottery were a welcome lifeline in a world that didn’t make much sense. 

Will Martin is a South African-born artist working in London. He uses his ceramics and textiles to create narrative installations. His practice combines personal experiences and art history to create site specific exhibitions. His current exhibition 'Liam' is on view at The Smallest Gallery in Soho, London throughout June.

I attended Wynberg Boys High School in Cape Town, South Africa. It was a desperate imitation of a British public school struggling to stay relevant in a newly liberated, and liberal, political environment. Even at that young age I viewed it and institutions like it to be intrinsically misogynistic, homophobic and racist, with a barely concealed militarised agenda, still visible in the shooting range, the war memorials and the annual pressenations by the British Armed Forces looking for Commonwealth cannon-fodder. My father had received a rugby scholarship to the school and had almost played for the country before pneumonia stopped his tryouts. He joined the navy and represented the country in sailing instead. I started pottery because I didn’t want to play rugby.

By the time I was 16 I was doing art subjects at 3 different schools, 5 days a week. They couldn’t squeeze in a session of hand tennis if they tried. I got 95% (an impossible number in an english grading system) for my end of year art project; a nightmarish installation of giant half finished drawings surrounded by confused collages and empty lube packets. It was so big, sitting in the middle of the hall, that it disrupted assemblies. This was done under the clever auspices of Mandy Colman. Unlike the other art teachers, she hadn’t slept with the students or had a mental breakdown. She roared and fought back and got stuff done. Several high profile contemporary artists have come out of her classroom, including Hasan and Husain Essop. Mandy took us to blue-chip galleries like Michael Stevenson, the National Gallery where we saw Jane Alexander’s ‘Butcher Boys’, and contemporary productions of ‘Othello’ and ‘Much Ado About Nothing’. While she was teaching she continued her own studies and showed a select few of us the work in progress. ‘Work into it’ was her mantra, and she was always right. Jennifer Frantisek was an antidote to the toxic masculinity of my environment.

I’d started pottery classes with her at 9 and left when I was 18 to continue my apprenticeship with John Bauer. Jenny taught me about permaculture, prehistoric Japan, William Morris, and glaze chemistry. Every year we studied and responded to the material culture of a different civilisation. She helped me with my science project (The Effect of Heat on Clay) which was displayed at the University Hall that I would eventually graduate in years later. Jenny took me to Tai Chi with her, talked me through the various heartbreaks of adolescence, and always counselled balance. She took me to ceramics workshops and guest lectures and even to my first wood firing weekend with Paul de Jongh. I stayed up all night with my back to the warm bricks, fire pouring out of the chimney as we threw logs in to raise the temperature above 1200 degrees C. Her kids went to a beautiful Waldorf school, and I received the afterglow of that education. Her son had built a giant Koi pond for his end-of-school self-motivated project. It sat in a large garden with an enormous, climbable pepper tree at its centre. There were rare breeds of chickens, an overly abundant plum tree, rampant dog roses, ginger, ginkgo, and several generations of pottery among the bushes. We did pit firings in the garden, with a bowl of vanilla essence on the lid so that the neighbours thought we were baking. Jenny made beautiful, refined, hand-built vessels with ropework like roils on the rims, taking inspiration from Jamon archeology. It’s a measure of her humbleness that I can’t find any pictures online.

Jenny past away a few years ago. Her family have kept her studio open to her students, and most importantly, kept her body of work intact. Jenny gave me my first exhibition in the public library down the road from her house, one day I’ll have to return the favour.

My interest in the work of William Martin started with his ‘confused with pot’ series of images which challenged individuals to be photographed with a a ceramic object; ensuing in a conversation about the development in the perceptions of something so intimate which we even hold and kiss several times over each day, like a bowl or a cup.

Martin’s work almost creates a new artistic genre of ‘performance craft’ and he continues this process with his participation in a group show ‘curious body’; here he created a photo-theatre for the expression of masculinity with ceramic objects. The result becomes a biography recorded as an image which documents the engagement with gender identity. i asked William about his work…

Your approach of incorporating people in your work and disseminating images may be easier than getting work featured on physical shows… did it play a role in your choice of work for this show?

It seems twee to mention The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction in this Post-Internet age, but the work seems to live more and more online. The proliferation of the image seems to solidify, rather than dissipate. People think they understand what they are seeing, a consensus of sorts is reached, there is less confusion, less anxiety about how they will engage with the object. I’m more and more tempted to simply produce photographs with handmade props, rather than objects in their own right. But I’ve found a way to have my cake and eat it. 

With the Curious Body installation, images are made, but the anxiety of objects is maintained. That is why physical shows are so important, I want there to be a visceral experience. By making a physical space for masculinity to be projected and constructed, I am able to make my digital community IRL. I have met some really interesting people through Instagram, Scruff and WhatsApp. This work will be a way of acknowledging those relationships and disseminating the results though that community. If I tried to make a work about masculinity by myself then I would only be able to talk about my experience as a man. By bringing in other artists I am able to expand the field of study, benefiting both the work and me as an individual trying to understand his place in the world.

Your previous work has a lot to do with the academics of progression and process, does this new performance pottery perhaps carry a more cultural connection?

I am still interested in Enlightenment ideals of progress as embodied by the Industrial Revolution. But I’m now applying that interest to the male body, and questioning the political and aesthetic role of Neo Classicism in the construction of contemporary masculinity. Ever since being introduced to the Romantic poets in undergrad, I resented the way my most intimate feelings had already been voiced for me. That the words and images I used were inherited without me knowing. I think this feeling has stuck with me, of distrusting my inheritance, wanting to trace it back so I can assess it, see if I still want it. I see ceramics as fundamentally performative. It performs tasks for people, this is what they mean when they ask ‘is it functional?’. But ceramics makes you perform too. That’s what I’m looking at with the chains. They way people handle them gently, comment on their weight, change their posture when they wear them. ­

Just picking up on the wording ‘neoclassical’ ‘romantic’ ‘military’ ­ is there a personal nostalgia in here somewhere, is it a reflection of your perception of masculinity?

I make no bones about this installation being a total product, not only my perception of masculinity, but also my fantasy of it. We are defined as much by what we reject as what we accept, and my experiences of growing up in a public boys school in Post ­Apartheid Cape Town with a naval sportsman father has irrevocably shaped my ideas of what it means to be a man. It’s difficult because what I’m trying to address in this installation is a shadow; It’s an idea of being a man that may not even exist. I’m fighting with a ghost. That’s the thing with a hole, you fill it with all this dross and then have to look at it and start unpacking it again, seeing what’s worth keeping.