Lucinda Mudge: Beauty, Fear and the Round Canvas

An introduction to the artist’s ceramic practice for High School Visual Arts Students

Lucinda Mudge was born in Knysna in 1979 and graduated from the Michaelis School of Fine Art at the University of Cape Town in 2000. She worked in London as a photographer for Ralph Lauren, took evening pottery classes in Brixton, and returned to South Africa in 2010, setting up a studio at Keurboomstrand near Plettenberg Bay. In 2013 the gallerist Trent Read invited her to make a body of vases. She had never made a coiled vase before and taught herself from online tutorials. Her work has since been shown in Making Africa at the Guggenheim Bilbao (2015) and in solo exhibitions in South Africa and London.

Symbolism

Mudge builds her surfaces from a set of images that recur from one collection to the next, so that they begin to work like a private alphabet.

Barbed wire rings the shoulders of several vases, borrowed from the high walls and fencing of suburban South Africa.

Tigers, leopards and other long-tailed animals stand in for human behaviour, particularly predation and appetite. Gold lustre is itself a symbol as much as a material: it signals wealth, luxury and value, and it is applied to imagery that is often anything but luxurious.

Text works in the same way, usually in plain, blunt phrasing drawn from news reports, pop songs and everyday speech. In Doors.Locked. (ceramic, 70 × 40 × 40 cm, 2014), the words inscribed into the clay are simply the security checklist the artist runs through before bed: doors locked, walkie talkie on, beams on, phone near bed. The list is ordinary, which is exactly what makes it unsettling.

Materials

Mudge is largely self-taught and works with what she has described as whatever method gets the result. Her vases are hand-coiled from clay supplied by a local pottery with a good quantity of coarse grog added to it. She builds in stages, watching for the point at which the base can no longer carry more weight, then wrapping the form in clingfilm and letting it dry in the sun before adding the next layer.

Many of her vases stand around 60 cm high, the largest around 85 cm, and a single piece can take weeks to build and up to three months to complete. Drawing is scratched and scraped into the wet clay, which means the marks survive into the finished surface. She mixes her own slips and stains rather than measuring commercial recipes. The work then goes through three firings. After the bisque firing she rubs black oxide into the piece and scrubs it off, so that it stays in the crevices and pulls the drawing forward.

Ceramics is unforgiving of technical error, and losses are part of the practice: in preparing her first exhibition she lost twelve works in nine months to cracking in the kiln. Love Story (IV) (ceramic, gold lustre, 42 × 35 × 35 cm, 2019) shows what the process produces when it succeeds: a dark, glassy ground, incised floral pattern, and a cartouche of plain lettering.

South African context

Mudge has said that her work is a reflection of what she sees and hears around her, and her subject is South African life: the gap between wealth and poverty, the routine of private security, and the presence of violence in daily conversation. Her first exhibition, The White Tiger and Other Stories (Knysna Fine Art, 2013), took its title from Aravind Adiga’s novel, because she saw parallels between social inequality in India and in South Africa.

The exhibition Kill You Eat You (Circa, Johannesburg, 2016) took its title from a Knysna news story in which a band filming a music video at the Heads was attacked and one of the attackers shouted the phrase.

How alive are you? (ceramic, 56 × 30 × 30 cm, 2014) borrows its question from a Ferrari advertisement and turns it on a country where physical risk is unevenly distributed: those who can afford walls and wire are protected from what everyone else lives with.

Mudge does not present herself as an outsider to this. She works in a place she has described as beautiful, and the work sits in the discomfort of being both privileged and afraid.

Concepts

Two ideas hold the practice together. The first is the deliberate collision of beauty and threat. The vases are glossy, gold and decorative, and the message on the surface is often harsh, so the viewer is not given a stable position from which to look.

The second is humour used as a method rather than as decoration. Mudge has said she uses humour, irony and mockery as a way of asking authentic questions, and that the ambivalence this creates is intentional: the viewer is not always sure whether the work is joking. The text is kept plain and unliterary on purpose, as a refusal of art-speak.

There is also a concept of accumulation. She holds work back through the year and exhibits it as a complete collection, so that a body of vases functions as a record of twelve months of news, songs, overheard talk and family life, with individual pieces balancing and referring to each other.

Composition: the vase as a round canvas

Mudge treats the vase as a canvas that happens to be round, and the roundness does specific compositional work. Because the surface has no edges, an image or a pattern that runs around the belly of the pot arrives back where it started, so the story links up and repeats. She uses that repetition as an image of the human condition, the idea that we are on repeat, doing the same things over and over.

The repeat also connects her surfaces to fabric design, which is one of her stated visual sources alongside cartoons, pop songs and Art Deco vase patterns: motifs are spaced across the ground in a regular rhythm, with bands of text or pattern circling the neck and shoulder like borders on printed cloth.

The second consequence of the round form is that the whole picture can never be seen at once. Something is always hidden on the far side, and the viewer knows it is there. Some of Mudge’s vases are built with two distinct sides for this reason. In Doors.Locked., one side carries a gold lily and the other the nightly security list. If you do not like the message, you can turn the vase to face the wall, which is the point: it is a compact model of choosing not to see something that you know has not gone away.

A note on sources

The biographical detail, technical process and exhibition history above come from published interviews and features on the artist, including Ceramic Review (May/June 2018), Wanted (March 2017), Between 10and5 (April 2016), House and Leisure (May 2016), LitNet (April 2014) and the Making Africa project site (April 2015). Where dimensions and dates are not recorded in those sources, works have been named without them.