Exhibitions
Norwich is very lucky to have the Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts as a centre for art at the University of East Anglia.  It often focusses on ceramics, with a permanent collection of some of my favourite potters like Lucie Rie, Edmund de Waal and Gabriele Koch, as well as weird and wonderful tribal art, butted up against Degas, Francis Bacon and Giacometti paintings.  It’s an amazing building designed by Norman Foster and has a tranquil feeling inside. They host fantastic exhibitions which I always want to go to but generally find myself, with one weekend before it closes, desperately trying to find a time to visit.
This happened last week when I realised that The Russia Season with Royal Faberge and Radical Russia about to close.  Visiting on the weekend with a three year old in tow was not appealing so I allowed myself to use part of my one child-free weekday to go.  I really struggle with this because as soon as I have child-free time, I think I must get into the workshop and frantically make pots.  I have a long list and really need to grab every moment that I can.  The guilt of doing anything else can be huge.  However, going to see exhibitions and absorbing visual culture to get new ideas and see how things have been done is so inspiring and really important to a maker’s work.  The delicious thrill of visiting somewhere all on my own is also rather enjoyable!
I was reminded of my GCSE History in the Faberge exhibition, with stories of the Russian royal family just before the Russian Revolution, their connection to Norfolk at Sandringham House and all the pieces that Faberge made for them, some gaudy, some funny and some sublime. Â I was particularly taken by a collection of cigarette cases, two in bright royal blue and one in golden yellow. Â The switchback snake design picked out in diamonds on one of the blue ones was the star for me.
The surprise joy was that I also got a ticket to see Roger Law: From Satire to Ceramics which is a small exhibition going on until 3rd April.  Seeing as it had ceramics in the title, I thought I should pop in although I was never a fan of Spitting Image, where he first found fame.  Actually, I thoroughly enjoyed all the images and models that they had displayed of the politics of my childhood.  It made me want to watch some of the shows again to see them as an adult.  The exhibition moved on from there, through some joyous sketch caricatures of famous people and then onto loose Chinese style ink drawings of animals and the pots he has produced when working in Jingdezhn , the porcelain city in China where from what I can tell, anything can be made of porcelain, the bigger the better!  I watched a video of Law sketching beautiful fish all over the surface of a huge, shallow bowl.  With no regard for health and safety, a Chinese worker took to the plate with a scalpel and carved out these fish, with not a dust mask in sight. I shuddered to think of the state of the poor man’s lungs but marvelled at the skill of the craftsmanship.  To finish the exhibition, there was a whole wall of sketches drawn by Law in China, working and experiencing everyday life there.  The life in the sketches, along with clear colours he painted them with were so wonderful, they filled me with joy for the rest of the day.  Now, when is the next exhibition on?
