Details

Object type

ceramic pot on chair

Artist/Maker

Rachel Mimiec maker

Place Associated

Glasgow, Scotland (place made)

Date

2022

Materials

clay, glaze, wood

Description

This sculpture by Glasgow-based artist Rachel Mimiec is a hand-built glazed ceramic in the shape of a pot filled with ceramic wheat forms that sits on a chair.

This work was made for Still Life - an exhibition at Lillie Art Gallery, Milngavie that reflected upon artefacts within the cultural and natural landscape of East Dunbartonshire, the council collections as well as incorporating remnants of a previous public art installation project - Scholar’s Rocks - within the area. This sculpture is part of a capsule collection acquired for Glasgow Museums that captures the artist’s current interests in landscape and human interaction.

In Still Life Mimiec’s work explored texture, colour and mark making through hand-built ceramics combined with prints and printed textiles made from digitally enlarged painted collages. Interested in the natural environment and our human relationship to it, Mimiec responded to this through the materials she used (clay, natural and man-made glazes) and structure (vessels, stones, botany). Her work in this show considered how we interact with what we take from the land, and how our cultural and economic growth impacts upon the natural environment.

“ Making a pot is akin to the shaping of a landscape. It is built up over time, its structure and strength is affected by external elements. The surface of the land, like that of the pot records a history of marks made by now invisible tools. Cores reveal deeper processes and extractions leave behind a negative space.

A landscape, like clay, has memory. The tools we have made allow us to cut, plough, drill and extract from our landscapes. But our civilisation has become vulnerable. Today we walk on the precipice of the cliff, the lip of the pot.”

Rachel Mimiec 2022

In her research for the show Mimiec also looked at Allander Ware ceramics in the East Dunbartonshire Museum collection. Allander Pottery operated from the banks of the river Allander at Milingavie, near Glasgow from 1904 until 1908. Allander Ware has a distinctive painterly glaze with vivid colours which Mimiec was inspired by as well as her research into the geology and human exploitation of the landscape around Milngavie. Her glazes for this work are a mix of colour glazes and one she made from the ground up mineral remains from the lime kilns from local area. These glazes are applied in layers in a loose, painterly fashion creating a rich, lush surface for her pots, vessels and rocks which to the artist ‘echo the landscape’.

Her work with ceramics and treatment of glazes and painting is intuitive and invites an emotional response to the landscape we experience around us through colour, texture and geology. Some of the work in this capsule collection have holes extracted from the side of the pot, others have ‘plugs’ inserted. These plugs a reminiscent of core samples – cylindrical samples drilled from either rock or the ground to use for testing properties, mineral presence or pollution. Although the sculptures are individual pieces, Mimiec has requested that a minimum of two sculptures can be shown together at any one time. She sees these works in dialogue with each other, the space they inhabit and the visual questions they raise in relation to each other; how they are displayed – whether on a chair or plant stand; plays between the sublime in landscape and domestic spaces; and their relationship to the viewer.

Credit Line/Donor

Bought by Glasgow Museums, 2023

ID Number

S.503

Location

In storage