Poetics from the kiln

Salman Ikram's pots are an exploration of the relationship between movement and time, and of the interplay between conscious intention and an unconscious use of skills and experiences.

The Ceramic Triennale organised by ASNA at the Karachi Arts Council is like a vast landscape seen from an increasingly tight perspective.

Omar Khayyam understood there was more to pottery than a potter making a pot. The results of creative endeavour on the wheel can communicate in an expressive manner, an expression that takes contributions from maker, materials, process and circumstance. The intrinsic nature of clay, its ever present connection to the earth, affords seemingly limitless possibilities, accommodations and plasticity. It has a physical adaptability suggestive of a range of human vagaries and complexities. Clay encompasses immediate material contradictions simultaneously: being both soft and hard, appearing fragile and strong, appropriate for exquisite miniaturisation and surprisingly monumental scale, intrinsically rooted to the past, wearing a perfect accomplished skin. The vast array of ceramics on show at the Ceramic Triennale organised by ASNA (Niilofur Farrukh, Meher Afroz and Shahnaz Siddique) at the Karachi Arts Council progress from technical mastery to artistic achievement and on to philosophical attainment, through which the ceramists' aspirations in nature and ideal for beauty in life are evident in clay.

For Saman Shamsie, technique always concerns continuous invention and experiment. It is never about reliable elegance or repeatability. The knife-edge presence of her painted forms emerges from an extended process of experiment and improvising towards a particular remembered sensation, a precise expression of an experience. Her previous series had used wide bowl shapes or occasionally a tight cylindrical profile both of which were suitable for a radically expressive, painterly approach to colours and glazes. Now she had to abandon the immediate spontaneity of her earlier work. In this case, the curvature required a greater subtlety; the lips of the vessels have a more precise relation to the volume and the cross section so that the space implied by their outer surfaces would unfold slowly to the inner eye. The vessels must also be able to hold a tightly disciplined system of crafted lines and stains. The creation of the new form went hand in hand with the development of a new type of crumbling linear decoration that wrapped round the vessel like rough woven raw silk. Over time, form and decoration slowly fused into one, a single inevitable presence arose, from hundreds of possibilities judged inadequate to the intensity of the original experience. Ceramics are, after all, female and a vase is actually one of the metaphors for a 'maternal vessel'. The archetypes of woman and vase correspond and it isn't coincidental that some of the fertility goddesses are often shaped like a 'natural vase'. Ceramics are an art 'fit' for a woman; an ancestral 'trade' created by women during the primary times of their matriarchal power.

This evident gender privilege has been comprehended and interpreted by many women artists of the recent con temporary school who, with implicitly demanding intentions, have elaborated visual and formal matters of intellectual impact. Shazia Zuberi is a ceramist who comes from a generation that doesn't need to claim it is belonging to one gender or the other. In her pieces, there isn' any shouting but, rather, finely-tuned tricks of thought, short-circuited by words and the traces of hands that are concerned with female stereotypes. In her pieces, there are ironic, sharp and conscious references to a domestic world populated by images and remnants of an experienced and worn subjectivity. Shazia creates heterogenic objects, inspired by ideas and icons found in the world of consumption but filtered by an impelling subjectivity. Tariq Javed's sculptural ceramics are inhabited by forms gone malicious, zoomorphic, or even phytomorphic; by obsessive, inexhaustible multiplications, of hybrid objects made on purpose for the sake of or in spite of art. These sculptures contain many reality 'doubles', disoriented clones, harmless and witty, consolidated by ceramic technique. Important objects are in custody here, proud to claim their belonging to the genius loci, loudly revealing their pedigree of noble craftsmanship. Tariq is the craftsman of an eclectic art — a direction I would define as the 'rich' and hyper-chromatic style of ceramics, made up of artificial colours, synthetic and gaudy paint and glazes. He brings the great tradition of faience ceramics to a blast and revolutionises it. The ancient practice of the hand-painted décor is updated by the artist who, with great self-confidence, renews a type of modern historical style, painted in a synthetic and even abridged manner through which he indulges himself in the story telling of his auto-referential tales. In fact, 'brightening up' the universe is the categorical imperative that is put into practice by the most vanguard streams of design. Also for Tarig Javed, brightening up the world with forms and most of all with colours is an urgent, unavoidable necessity. Through the thousands of ceramic fetishes, sometimes tenter but often teasing and menacing, swurms the meticulous disorder of his creations.

With stoic, monk-like slowness he has, from year to year, come upon new techniques. Often found by chance, not sought, Mian Salahuddin has quietly developed and incorporated them into his work. ASNA presented a tribute to the genius of this master potter through a tiny retrospective of his oeuvre. His vessels are successful, though they follow no trend and can serve as models for those young ceramists, who must hunger their way towards maturity.

Mian's education marked the beginnings of his meticulous studies of historic vessel-making technique. His research reflects a steadfast perfectionist attitude which is necessary for the time-consuming, painstaking technique process he has wrought not only from history but from intensive experimentation. A careful pre determined approach has effected a gradual and easily traced al chemisation of technique and form into symbol and meaning. While there is & stratified rock like quality to his work, its optical intensity and visual depth parallels the reflective beauty of the rock face of a waterfall. Mian masterfully articulates the different modes of space by shifting hard, ribbed areas with lush, colourful ones and by cutting through the exterior space to reveal the space within. Several large covered forms assume a monumental presence among the vessel-oriented work. While most of Salahuddin's work is essentially figurative, these vessels have an architectural feel. They are evocative of Buddhist temples such as Borobudar and Angkor Wat.

Salman Ikram's pots are an exploration of the relationship between movement and time, and of the interplay between conscious intention and an unconscious use of skills and experiences. Both in form and surface, his pots are loose orchestrations of geometry and colour which tell the story of the making process. The spirals indicate vigorous throwing, a characteristic of his work, and exploit the fluid quality of glazes in salt-firing which flow and pool among the surface variations. This relationship between form and surface is integral to Salman's aesthetic approach to ceramics. It is important to him that his pots tell the story of the hands and the fire that brought them to life. His surfaces snap. and crackle with energy through layers.of slip and dry-brushed glaze.

Ishrat Suhrawardy's current exploration ef the teapot is a metamorphosis of its traditional form and purpose. Though these teapots are lidded, handled, spouted, pouring vessels, few, if any, would function satisfactorily as teapots. Ishrat has chosen a perfect format for integrating and exploring both the formal techniques of functional pottery and the numerous expressions of sculpture. The teapots reveal a dedication to perfection of craft and skill imbued with metaphor. The work is precise, rich in texture and colour, perfect in form, balance and symmetry, yet it also invokes questions by transforming everyday mundane objects into objects of beauty that bring to mind a number of symbolic interpretations. Slender, elongated spouts, carefully chosen glazes and textures, and a balanced arrangement of forms remind one of antique oil cans or of Shino-glazed Momoyama ceramics of Japan, and a time when attention was paid to the details of the smallest, most utilitarian items. Once manufactured by hand, serviceable items are now churned out enmasse with concern for costs and profits, not necessarily quality and beauty. Ishrat's work, in part, pays homage to a past era and way of thinking. Sadia Salem's ceramic pieces stress the decorative possibilities of the form. The botanical forms seem to emerge from an ancient object, their personal and cultural associations lost in time. The series on show is an investigation of the way personal domestic rituals have become a replacement for broader body rituals. This is the work of a sensitive, deliberate gardener and yet there is an elemental quality to this work that appeals to the senses and to our sense of the earth. It exudes an aura of quiet peacefulness and demands leisurely con temptation and intimacy. The eye lingers on a rim that is like the edge of a leaf, or on a shoulder that is like a pebble high lighted by rain or etched by lichen. These pieces reveal themselves in layers, increasingly sophisticated and rich in discoveries, from the outside in, over time becoming more intriguing and generous to the senses - like the female sex. Seeing life as moving through cycles of emergence and waves of rhythm, Mudita Bhandari - the only Indian entry in the show - views her vessels as a metaphor for the moments of becoming through the cycles and transitions of life; The form of the vessel with Its symbolism of outpouring, of emptying and filling, has substance through which the ephemera and detritus of historical lived experience can come and go. The austerity of the vessel's form implies endurance; the sense of the mutable makes that imaginative space for new understanding. The sense of touch is important both in the making and in the appreciation of her finished work, 'Skins of Water' on show.

Touch stimulates associations beyond the visual and the intellectual. Subtle details are revealed when the vessel is held, enhancing the poignant experience of the hard vitrified material against the softness of the form. The vase seals a work itinerary which, through ceramics, is a coherent return to the roots of man's civilisation. Historicity - meaning the mental, as well as material pathway - opens to what is beyond, through the disarticulation of standard shape and its re-composition to form fantastic images which do not disappoint the basic structure. Rana Omar's work is part of this cultural process and, since we are not speaking of sterile citations, the field expands and the vase plays the dual role of being a link to and a research on the past. Thus, the vase as a myth, in the meaning of an exemplary form, is full of cultural and historical values. Omar has created a basic structure in which the factors of function are present, above all, those of being a container. On this basic structure, the artist at first checks its static tolerance by means of a series of ways that revoke the different construction modules: from symmetry to linear difference; from negative to positive; from full to void; and with changes towards pure sculpture. Thus the vase becomes a microcosmos in which the different elements relate to each other. Therefore, the little palms, the moulding, folding, and the overlapping curling features, graft the vases into permanent dynamism. The use of matt colours, absorbed by the material, projects the object into an evocative distance.

Ghania Asad does not escape the lure of the vessel despite all appearances to the contrary. She fills them to the brim with images and stories — the cup and saucer story - that incorporate visual puns, obscure or blatant associations tied together or motivated by clever combinations. Ghania largely builds upon classic compositions but she has enrolled in her cast all the clichés of the dime store knick knack. These odd juxtapositions of cups and saucers and free associations of ideas make up surprisingly eloquent and coherent stories. Almost like a husband and wife subjected to differing situations, some cups and saucers ask disturbing questions, others evoke an uncomfortable snicker, cutting too close to the bone or pushing the limits of propriety. But the work is tempered by a generous dose of Ghania's fearless humour: This exhibition is like a vast landscape seen from an increasingly tight perspective. From the grace of Salman Ikram's vessels, to the fertile imagination of Mian Salahuddin’s phallic cylinders, to the enhanced focus of Sadia saleem’s organic shapes, these works speak about our world, in many different voices.