Paul Scott, 'Urn....', 2003.

'Urn....'
Paul Scott
Glazed Ceramic with transfer print
Edition (2 of 5)
270 x 190 x 50
2003
Purchased for £250 (I think, it might have been less)
2013.002

I like this. I like Paul, I like his work and I have two pieces - both bought at the same time, actually I prefer the other one. I'll do that one another day.

I bought this because, and this sometimes happens, I don't want to put myself through the mileage and time and everything that gets invested in making a purchase without a decent haul. This is an approach more easily afforded in better times and when I had fewer children. So I regarded this as a sort of 'stocking filler', an ornament albeit an ironic one. I also can't shake the sense in which it was perhaps a bit of a 'homage' to Piero Fornasetti. Homage is a kinder word than 'rip off'. That it is 'derivative' and 'ornamental' somehow comes across in a pejorative way in my eyes although why I should think it of this, and not of other pieces in the 'Cumbrian Blue(s)' branded body of work which completely depends on the reworking of 'standard' designs I don't know. However I didn't think then, and don't think now, that it has the conceptual strength and resonance of other pieces. Particularly those connected to the Sellafield Nuclear site, The fabulous 'Present from Whitehaven' teapot which Paul once handed me on a business card and the brilliant work he created on standard meat plates in response to the foot and mouth outbreak in 2000. It feels minor.

I haven't seen Paul for probably a decade. He is one of those people that I think I know because on the rare occasions we are in the same room he nods hello and I feel I know his goings on - mainly because he is a particularly energetic tweeter and facebooker. I occasionally 'like' something he says or does, actually I like it all. His feeds bring news of a frantic pace of life teaching, publishing, art politicking and showing, oh, and waiting in airports. After all when better to update your status?

I bought this and the other piece from a show at Tullie House in Carlisle or maybe from his house, I'm not sure and actually I can't remember the price either.

The context was that I had recently commissioned a piece from him for the new flood defences at Maryport Harbour in 2002/3 which he was great about doing. The project was engineer led which gave rise to some small areas of 'misunderstanding'. None of them a big deal but the build process which was very contract led could have yielded a better quality of support to him. 12 years on the commission still looks great.

I curated the commissions at the invitation of Allerdale Borough Council and I had approached him because his recent residency at the Beacon Museum in Whitehaven had been game changing for his work, helping to confirm as a central concern in his practice the use of print in ceramics. Of course the fact that a vitreous enamel surface seemed so suited to sea defences was not lost on me. Paul lived locally and I felt that he was not being offered local commissions. Locally based artists are almost always ignored in favour of incoming ones, it being so much easier to be a prophet from afar. But Paul's work was being actively collected by Museums including the V&A and other craft type collectors. He had been energetic in seeking this kind of subscription for his work and around this time pursued his collaboration as a fabricator for Conrad Atkinson's landmines again, I suspect, mindful of its value to his career.

Anyway here is the thing that bothers me, the thing I need to sort out. I can think of many working in 'craft' who have used the apparatus used by artists to promote their work. This appropriation has always made me uncomfortable. The resume detailing subscription and critical appraisal, commissions, collections and so on. The catalogue in which a curator who knows the subject personally self-consciously refers to them by their second name throughout, or when the exhibitor writes of themselves in the third person. The white cube presentation of work 'as if it were art' and yet for 'craft' there is not the same rigorous critical environment. It looks like art.... but is it? Is it just pretending... anyway I will have more to say about craftiness in other posts. Paul is an artist who has made this transition. When I first came across his work as curator at Abbot Hall Art Gallery in Kendal he showed with the 'Cumbria Craft Guild'. He was definitely more crafts council than arts council at the time. Paul is a craftsman who has become an artist and his work will always carry that provenance. There is a tension in that and it also worries me that as 'Cumbrian Blues' he is prolific. Producing at 'cottage industry' if not factory volumes. There are a lot of 'Cumbrian Blues' but then I suppose there's a lot to be blue about in Cumbria.

One more thing...

On the back of the 'Urn....' which being very flat and handmade doesn't balance very well are a collection of stamps and signatures. Partly they exist because I suspect Paul is absolutely seduced by the world of collectable blue ceramics but there is also a signature and a last stamp warranting that this is 'Real Art'.

Does that settle it?

Links
Cumbrian Blue(s)