Chelsea potter and artist Kate Braine opened her striking 18th-century townhouse last night for a preview of her June solo exhibition, Tendril is the Night, curated by Fru Tholstup. 300 fantastical pots, created over two decades, whose sculpted branches curl and twist along walls, shelves and surfaces, were unleashed in a The Day of the Triffids-style takeover of the elegant house.
Braine takes inspiration from the natural world, but these aren’t sea creatures, flora or plants you’ve seen before; she intends to shock with kaleidoscopic colour, ideas and design techniques. Vibrant “Red Poppy Glazed Pots” team clay with melted recycled miniature liquor bottles, cocktail goblets, sacks of broken windscreen car glass and Murano glass which gleams in bloody pools clashing against malachite-green walls. An assortment of “Veg and Vag” three-dimensional shapes lie provocatively along the panelled entrance hall. Menacing dark forest lagoon beings spread their multi-limb fringes from mantelpieces and lava alien flowers tantalise with droplets of glass beads like amber nectar nestling within their leaves which, in Braine’s world, is guaranteed to poison.
“All the things I was terrified of as a child, like the music of [i]Peter and the Wolf[/i,] have come out through my work” explains Braine. “I was in the tsunami in 2004, so these underwater sea monsters are born from my fear of water.”
The house makes a comfortable backdrop for female body parts and slashed pots because it has a heritage of experimentation and innovative design. During the 19th century it was the home and studio of the most important ceramicist of the arts and crafts movement, William De Morgan, who created complex lusters and deep glazes in designs of otherworldly fish and birds. However, subjects such as white shiny “Carmen Roller Creatures” never featured in his oeuvre of work. Braine rolls and curls the clay, like hair around a roller, before pinning it quickly at the optimum temperature to the body of the pot using bamboo chopsticks.
De Morgan’s career was rich and varied as a designer; he was a potter, inventor and novelist, and Braine’s artistic career has also spanned different mediums. Originally she studied art and sculpture at City Guilds School of Art creating bronze portrait busts and body parts. Several white plaster cast feet and hands are displayed around the pots, and a life-size bronze Chuck Berry strumming his guitar welcomes visitors into the garden.
Braine works here in a former Turkish Bathhouse, where she’s installed her potter’s wheel and a kiln surrounded by a “Pottery graveyard” bed of poppy tendrils which sprout through the soil. “I want to push clay to its limits of breakability, sometimes I’m amazed it survives.” Hence the broken shards. “Clay has a memory so it’s hard to push into position but I want to go beyond what I think it can do”. In her range of spiky and sharp-edged organic beings with their glazed veil of intimidation this ceramicist provocateur is also pushing us. “I want people to feel something.”
Tendril is the Night: June 27 – July 1 2019 and by appointment in the month of July. 20 Cheyne Row, SW3 5HL
