Ceramic and Story

Article by Laura O’Donnellcraft early in her childhood. Her works in this exhibition pay homage to the folk art style of ceramic figurines and turned wood dolls or puppets and their potential for telling stories. Like master Geppetto’s Pinocchio, Grimm brings to life inanimate material through her fusion of folk art/craft and fine art. Her intense desire to become a potter, the unification and transformation of Germany to a capitalist society, her travel to the US to study and work, her interest in German and ceramics history, and her direct experience with art of the early Italian Renaissance provide rich material for her sculptures. While stripping down stories to their essence and bringing the world of ‘once upon a time’ to the present, Grimm creates a nostalgic sense of place and of connected culture.

Restposten (German for “remaining stock”) brings together selections from Grimm’s previous series Lirum Larum Löffelstiel (2011), Beyond the Figurine (2012), and Triumphzug (2013) all of which invoke a sense of history surrounding the mythos of creation: physically as in The Creation of Gerit Grimm, culturally as in Monument–Augustus the Strong and artistically as in Expulsion of Adam and Eve from Eden. Lirum Larum Löffelstiel, is a series of autobiographical works titled after the German nursery rhyme. Beginning at the beginning with The Creation of Gerit Grimm, she creates works that reflect significant events that shaped her life up to the present. Beauty Parlor, one of my favourites from this series, is a rumination on her time in California and encountering people’s obsessions with creating perfect bodies. Grimm infuses humour when she extrapolates on this mind

Artists as well as others today are rediscovering the pleasures of telling stories. Gerit Grimm’s exhibition, Restposten, on view

at Illinois Wesleyan University’s Merwin Gallery (Bloomington, Illinois, US) from 10 November through 10 December, 2014, was a demonstration of a contemporary interest in taking seemingly familiar histories and translating their core elements. In the works in Restposten, she draws from her own life story, German cultural history, as well as symbolic and anecdotal narratives from Western art history and mythology. Through her style of using wheel-thrown clay figures and settings, she makes these stories resonate with viewers.

Grimm recalls storytelling being an integral part of her childhood in Halle, the German Democratic Republic (East Germany). Growing up in a socialist system, she had limited access to consumer goods and rarely viewed colour television. Like the other inhabitants in her hometown she spent her leisure time pursuing hobbies, socialising, telling stories and creating things. Her parents’ modest collection of affordable folk art, dolls and pottery introduced her to

Gerit Grimm’s Constructed Histories

set, realising that, like Hollywood, her practice also involves sculpting bodies and creating narrative scenes. She observes that what she and potters do in the studio by throwing or constructing parts and arranging them to see which of the multiple options works best strangely parallels beauticians and plastic surgeons offering various aesthetic options to their clients. Arms, hair, bottoms, can all be snipped, replaced, moulded, just like clay. Beauty Parlor, with the artist at her workstation on the left forming an arm and the preening figures looking in their mirrors on the right, provides a glimpse into this melded world of the studio/salon.

Whereas the works in Lirum Larum Löffelstiel are derived primarily from personal experience, the sculptures from Beyond the Figurine are an examination of the history of European ceramic figurines, how they came to be and the current influence of their tradition. Responding to the collection of English Staffordshire and French faience at the Long Beach Museum of Art,1 Grimm creates a tale surrounding them that includes examining the history of Meissen porcelain from her native country. (Dresden is approximately 85 miles from Halle.) From vignettes of the king to genre scenes, the sculptures in her marketplace provide

Facing page, above: Beauty Salon. 2011. Wheel-thrown, unglazed stoneware. 16 x 40 x 9 in.

Facing page, below: Overview of Resposten in Merwin Gallery. Above left: Monument. 2011. Wheel-thrown,

unglazed stoneware. 58 x 23 x 23 in.Above right: Image Peddler and Female Shopper. 2011. Wheel-thrown,

unglazed stoneware. Man: 68 x 26 x 26 in. Woman: 62 x 22 x 22 in.

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a glimpse into the socio-political state of affairs that enabled ‘white gold’, high-fire, high quality porcelain, to be made in Europe and its resulting effect. The story centres on Augustus the Strong, elector of Saxony and king of Poland, who maniacally strong-armed the alchemist John Friedrich Böttger to discover the secret of porcelain, which at the time was more costly than gold.2 Although Grimm’s Monument is a reference to Dresden’s best known landmark, the Golden Rider (an equestrian statue of Augustus II), it goes further in that it not only displays the political importance of Augustus on his rearing horse, but it also depicts his obsession with porcelain on the lower register as the curly-hair Augustus examines a teapot. Unlike the driven, greedy, lusty despot recounted in Janet Gleeson’s The Arcanum, Grimm’s sovereign possesses a regal elegance and his gestures have a whimsical quality associated with marionettes. In her iteration of this important event in the history of ceramic figurines

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Böttger appears to the left of Augustus holding a Chinese vase, one of 18 that had been traded for 600 soldiers and their families, symbolising the high stakes and greed for porcelain in Europe at the time.

Following the successful formulation of porcelain and the production of elegant dinnerware, figurines and menageries for the king, the craze for ceramic figurines spread. The middle class now wanted to have ceramic figures for their homes and mantelpieces. Thus, the Meissen style was soon copied by other potteries and made in less expensive earthenware. Market squares bustled with peddlers, such as Grimm’s life-sized Image Peddler and Female Shopper, selling ceramic figurines depicting actors, celebrities of the day (famous and infamous), genre and pastoral figures. Her peddler offers his range of wares to the entranced shopper who salivates over them with a broken statue at her feet; thus encapsulating the irony that they themselves are ceramic figurines who desire and barter miniatures of themselves.

As a maker of ceramic figures, Grimm is a direct descendant of this history. Her technical prowess at throwing and her development of refined artistic concepts is the result of years of hard work. At 18, she apprenticed for three years, learning the traditional German trade as a potter, at the Altbürgeler blau-weiss GmbH, a production pottery in Bürgel, Germany. Then she worked as a journeyman for another year before enrolling at the Academy of Art

& Design Burg Giebichenstein in Halle, Germany. Here she received a classic arts education steeped in Bauhaus aesthetics. After seeing an exhibition of American Funk ceramics, her artistic world transformed and she wanted to go to the US. This dream was fulfilled and she earned an MA from the University of Michigan School of Art and Design and later an MFA from the New York State College of Ceramics at Alfred University.

Utilising traditional ceramic craft processes, Grimm has developed an innovative and distinct approach to making sculpture with wheel-thrown parts. She credits her ceramic hero the Hungarian artist Margit Kovács (1902–1977), a leader in developing new ways of working with ceramic materials and pushing the potters wheel beyond its utilitarian application into a tool for the production of narrative sculpture, for serving as a model for extending the ceramic figurine tradition. Grimm adds her own voice to this tradition through her technical virtuosity on and off the wheel, her use of raw, unglazed, brown clay and her approach to the works’ scale, which is larger than the typical figurine.

Expanding her study further beyond historical ceramic figures, in Triumphzug (Triumphal Procession) she draws her inspiration from the lyrical treatment of the human form in Florentine frescoes and the ceramic tondi of Lucca della Robbia from the Early Renaissance. Travelling to Italy provided Grimm with a first-hand opportunity to see the genesis of a tradition of figural representation in which images on a flat surface were given the illusion of depth. Whereas sculptures from earlier in her career have

Above: Bonaiuto Bundle. 2013. Wheel-thrown, unglazed stoneware.21 x 16 x 7 in. Facing page, left: Expulsion of Adam and Eve from Eden. 2013. Wheel-thrown, unglazed stoneware. 48 x 27 x 10 in. Facing page, right: Expulsion (Detail).

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bright polychromatic, glossy glazes and quirky narratives that reflected her infatuation with Funk and Pop Art, the works from Triumphzug, like the works that inspired them, are more subtle, more graceful in both tone and gesture. Like the works in Lirum Larum Löffelstiel and Beyond the Figurine, Grimm eschews glaze, giving the pieces a warm brown, stone-like surface on which every nuance, (throwing lines, inscribed texture and so forth) is perceptible.

Grimm’s appropriation of figure groups in works such as Bonaiuto Bundle and Expulsion of Adam and Eve from Eden invites comparison with their original sources: Andrea di Bonaiuto’s frescoes in Santa Maria Novella and Masaccio’s Expulsion of Adam and Eve from Eden in the Brancacci Chapel, Santa Maria del Carmine. Although on opposite ends of the emotional spectrum, these works reproduce the human feeling embedded in the symbolism of the original fresco. Bonaiuto Bundle stems from the Early Renaissance’s use of dancing women to represent tranquillity and harmony and the Expulsion of Adam and Eve from Eden captures the anguish associated with the Fall of Man. In translating the lyrical expressiveness of these frescoes into clay, Grimm displaces the figures from their illusionistic settings and displays them on the wall. This is more successful in the Expulsion of Adam and Eve from Eden than in Bonaiuto Bundle. In Andrea di Bonaiuto’s fresco, three women dance gracefully in a line with their hands lightly joined while another

woman on the right plays the tambourine. The floral background field adds to the sweetness and harmony of the scene. By removing the figures from the pastoral landscape, Grimm’s rendition relies on the rhythm of the figures placement, their doll-like quality and the implied line of their gazes to establish the mood. Conversely, in Grimm’s Expulsion of Adam and Eve from Eden she successfully uses the austere wall as a setting for the loss of Eden. The direct gallery light source creates dramatic shadows on the wall as the ceramic angel sweeps down to usher Adam and Eve out of paradise. The shadow of the angel’s spiky hair casts a dark aura around the sword, reinforcing the emotional content of the scene.

By re-mastering the classic themes from the Early Renaissance as well as bringing to light obscured histories like that of porcelain and her own life story, Grimm adds to the tradition of creating visual narratives. Injecting human emotion into her lithe, wheel thrown figures Gerit Grimm, with a quiet humour, taps into our desire to be told stories. Through her imaginative combination of figures, she merges her history with that of the past as parts of the same continuum. Her artist’s statement summarises her work which “combines both narrative and form – synthesising pots with fairytales in a way that tests the boundaries of each. The result is often an uncanny union – one that evokes all manner of stories about dolls, puppets and statues coming to life. It is a union at once wonderful, elegant and fanciful but also at times uncomfortable and awkward.”3

endnotes1. Gerit Grimm:Beyond the Figurine, exhibition

catalogue, Long Beach Museum of Art, 2012.2. For more information on Augustus II, Böttger and

the history of European porcelain see Janet Gleeson, The Arcanum:The Extraordinary True Story. Warner Books, Inc, New York, 1998.

3. More of Gerit Grimm’s work can be seen on her website: www.geritgrimm.com

Laura O’Donnell, a ceramics artist and writer, teaches Art History and Ceramics at Parkland College in Champaign, Illinois, US.