INTERVIEW: Ceramicist Eddie Curtis
Eddie Curtis' solo exhibition is on at The Stratford Gallery until Saturday, 8th July, Here he talks to Herald arts about his work
LIKE his coal miner father before him, Eddie Curtis gets his hands dirty for a living. The ceramic artist creates structures and vessels seemingly hewn from boulders, rocks and craggy granite on which nature has imprinted some magic.
But they are in fact rendered from clay, with exquisite surface details derived from the application of heat — by blowtorch and kiln — on the glazes and porcelain that coat his works.
Stepping into The Stratford Gallery on Sheep Street, where Eddie has a solo show until 6th July, one is beguiled by these geological forms — like nature itself, the work is both brutal and beautiful, and utterly mesmerising.
It is the day before his solo show opens, and Eddie, with gallery owners Howard and Emma Clegg, is setting up. He takes a break to greet me warmly and explain some of the ideas behind his work.
Eddie grew up in Seaham, just south of Sunderland in the heart of Durham Coalfield. But it wasn’t until seven years ago that Eddie experienced what he calls his ‘Damascene moment’ — a profound encounter with the nearby local landscape that led to a new phase in his career.
Eddie explains: “In the summer of 2010 I revisited a particular stretch of coastline, locally referred to as The Blast, near Seaham.
“I hadn’t been there for nearly 40 years. It had been the dumping ground for the local coal mine until the mines were closed in the 1980s. When I was very small I had walked along the coast with my father on payday to collect his earnings from the wages office at the mine.
“We’d stop and he would point in the direction of the horizon and explain that was where he worked; three miles out and deep below the North Sea. It was a concept I could never come to terms with.
“As a teenager I would occasionally visit The Blast with friends. This was a place so desolate and grim it attracted various film producers, and the iconic movie Get Carter, starring Michael Caine, concludes with the bad guy meeting his fate here and finally being dropped out to sea from a coal conveyor.
“Later, the opening scene from Aliens 3 was also shot here; a bleak testimony to the qualities of The Blast landscape.”
He continues: “Forty years on since my previous visit, nature has made an amazing attempt to reclaim what is hers, and the ravages of industry have been softened to a degree where a strange lunar kind of landscape now prevails.
“The sea has removed nearly all of the detritus and continues to eat away the coal/sand aggregate leaving an exposed shelf, revealing varying strata of industrial waste. At the foot of the limestone cliffs an iron inclusion weeps red-brown stains into a large marooned rock pool known as Red Lake.
“Sun-baked mud dries cracked and crazed with visceral ooze seeping between the gaps. There is an overload of visual metaphor and yet a strange stark beauty has won over.”
Despite having a very successful body of work — his copper red porcelain series, which had won prizes throughout Europe — Eddie was so inspired by the stunning coastal landscape that he dropped that work almost overnight and began The Blast Series, which is largely what is shown at Stratford.
Looking back, I ask Eddie if there was any thought of him going down the mines.
“I am one of three boys, and we were completely and utterly forbidden by the parents to think that we may have a career down the mine. We had to stick in at school,” recollects Eddie with a kind of bemused amazement.
He continues: “I remember on a school trip, aged 18, we were taken down one of the local mines, and you thought: ‘Wow, this is something we’ve avoided, that’s fantastic’.”
It was at art school in Sunderland that Eddie found his affinity for clay, and that led to him studying ceramics at the Bath Academy of Arts. But the road to becoming an artist wasn’t straightforward. After art school, he moved back north and worked night shifts at a factory as a ‘repetition thrower’ making dog bowls.
“I made 16,000 in one year. We didn’t even have a dog,” recalls Eddie with a chuckle.
The ‘we’ is his wife, Margaret Curtis, also a renowned ceramicist. About 40 years ago the couple bought Middle Rigg, an old farmstead, where they share a studio and brought up their two daughters, Layla, who is also an artist, and Hannah, a web designer.
Describing Middle Rigg, Eddie says it is in the Northern Pennines, west of Durham, and has “the best view in the whole of the valley”.
As we talk and look around his work, I ask Eddie about the process he goes through to create them.
“What I try to do is to work with processes that almost replicate Earth’s processes. So I work with huge textual bodies of clay and also a powerful blowtorch and I will almost destroy the surface of the pot so that I get fractal, fractures and grazes. I replicate with water, clay and fire what happens in the earth itself — to recreate the very things that inspired me in the first place.”
He continues: “What I try to do is work in a very organic way. I don’t have a fixed idea of what the finished piece will look like, but rather I look and say do I like that?
“And because clay is terribly forgiving I can actually say: ‘I don’t like that’, and start again.”
Some of Eddie’s work has lids and handles — are they functional pots or works of art?
“They are sculptures,” says Eddie. “But what I’m trying to do is give you an extra kind of possibility. It gives them an extra dimension and it’s interesting to see people engaging with them, lifting the lids and peering inside.”
Did Eddie’s mum and dad get to see his success?
“My mother is 100 in December, she still has a fantastic mind. My dad unfortunately died in 2004, but he was so excited by my work with ceramics.
“In fact he became so enraptured by the process of pottery that I would drop a bag of clay at his house and he would sit at the table and make little miniatures of all the local churches, which included very precise details.
“We still have them in glass boxes. He said he’d wished he’d had the opportunity when he was younger. He also liked icing wedding cakes,” adds Eddie surprisingly.
Eddie explains: “My mum would make the cakes and then he would do these ornate, three-tier iced extravaganzas. He was this muscular guy with huge biceps... a miner, icing cakes.
“He was working down the mines lying down all day on his back with a pickaxe passing the coal behind him to be put in coal tubs and then he would come home of an evening and ice cakes — from black to white.”
There’s also a poetry to the fact that you’ve avoided the mines, but the earth had got you…
“Precisely, that is the strange thing. I’ve gone round in a circle but this is a celebration of what could have been and what isn’t, and now I’m making art out of the avoidance of being down the mine.”
Where and when: Eddie Curtis, Modern Master is on at The Stratford Gallery, Sheep Street, Stratford, until 8th July. See www.thestratfordgallery.co.uk or call 01789 414400.
