14 November to 06 December
SARA FLYNN BY SEBASTIAN BLACKIE
How artists locate themselves within a wider community of practice
may bring insight to their inspiration as well as some of the
imperatives that sustain them. Sara Flynn belongs to a generation of
Irish ceramic artists who are confidently engaging with an international
audience and whose work stylistically is far removed from the rustic
traditional crafts, which are often closely associated with tourism and
in Ireland are charged with a particularly powerful cultural/national
identity. It is then surprising to learn that Flynn is not from the
city but works in picturesque rural isolation on the very western edge
of Europe. As many Irish have done she looks westward to the future,
her work and life style being a measure of how heterogeneous craft
practice has become. Her pots are not emblematic of a rural idyll nor
in any conscious way are they influenced by the visual landscape in
which she works. There is however a relationship between Flynn’s
vessels and the place she chooses to make them. It is not a
topographical relationship but the quality of solitude that supports
focused reflection so necessary for some kinds of art practice.
Flynn’s
work reveals some of the characteristics of Hans Coper’s work; a potter
she has greatly admired throughout her ceramic career. There is an
obsessive passion for clay’s unique qualities, a sustaining fascination
with the “thingness” of vessels as abstract forms largely unrelated to
utilitarian pots which serve our bodily needs. Coper’s famous thought
that he was: ”like a demented piano tuner seeking the perfect pitch” is
an appropriate way to understand Flynn’s practice relaying as it does on
just a few key element.
All Flynn’s work is thrown porcelain.
With modernist concerns such as truth to material and process we are
used to ‘read’ how things are made. We are familiar with the
‘vocabulary’ of construction with resistant materials and reductive
processes such as carving or the results of casting with liquids. But
the use of plastic or viscous material with its shifting identity is
encountered less often in our daily lives and the aesthetics of
displacement seem more mysterious, Flynn’s exploration of form is not
confined by the wheel but develops often asymmetrically from the rhythms
of throwing, the line of the rim often being particularly important.
The soft clay forms are squeezed, indented or pinched to enhance
fluidity and establish an individual identity. Flynn’s creativity is
focused in the act of working with plastic clay; any subsequent work is
at its service.
