Bo Yang Lake, Lotus Flowers, Flower Pictures 2006. Pics © Heini Schneebeli and Felicity Aylieff
A backstreet Chinese unit called Mr Yu’s Big Ware Factory might not sound like most art lecturers’ choice of sabbatical location, especially if you can’t speak Chinese and aren’t intent on recreating designs traditionally associated with the country.
For Felicity Aylieff, though, the proposal went further, agreeing a contract stipulating the huge porcelain ceramics she created in Jingdezhen in 2007 would go on tour in the UK upon her return.
“Aylieff has been described as a contemporary ceramicist whose work crosses the boundaries of ceramics and sculpture with extreme ease,” says The Lightbox Director Marilyn Scott, who has invited the display to Woking for the latest leg of a journey which started last October.
Chasing Red 2006. Pics © Heini Schneebeli and Felicity Aylieff
“These more recent works clearly position her reputation for sculptural forms and dissolve the distinction between craft and art.”
Aylieff had to ensure her pieces, which were three metres high, left enough kiln spaces for the conventional Chinese creations her fellow workers sold to survive to continue being produced.
“I have to summon up quite a bit of courage to make the first mark on what seems like a huge blank canvas,” she wrote in correspondence to the RCA on her first attempt. Each pot was handpainted over a period of two days, shifting a stepladder to ingrain different sections of the urn.
Sweeping brooms, carvers and Chinese calligraphy brushes were experimented with, adding layers of colour to forge a greater depth of surface, and enamel butterflies have been applied, decreasing in size to the top of the base to give the illusion of flying away.
Weighing in at 240 kilograms and requiring a team of assistants to move them, her works are imposing and impressive mementoes of Aylieff’s Chinese experiment.
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