Troubling ceramic art material imaginings in the field of visual art: Ruth Duckworth and Grayson Perry

Abstract

Ruth Duckworth and Grayson Perry approach clay as a material for creative expression from different perspectives that are firmly located within their individual subjectivities, temporalities, spatial practices and in the wider cultural and socio-political contexts in which their works and methodologies are situated. In this essay Duckworth and Perry bear the burden of representation of being female and male, respectively, and in this respect their artworks reflect their individual responses to gender distinctions. Duckworth explores issues of sex and gender somewhat obliquely by comparison to Perry who takes a strident approach to what he perceives as a form of discrimination against men through their cultural representation as a result of British society’s expectations of masculinity. Perry expresses concepts of gender distinction and transformation through his embrace of transvestism as a way of life combined with heterosexual marriage, and in his work, writings and broadcasts in the media. Duckworth is largely silent and leads a more self-contained private life so that understanding her response to gender can only be a matter of interpretation from her ceramic practice. The juxtaposition of these two artists provides an opportunity to consider how they each address gender through their work. This comparison also reveals some of the ways that the application of social and cultural interpretations of and responses to sex and gender contributes to a perception of Duckworth and Perry as sharing a degree of outsider status. Neither can be said to be purely an outsider artist yet their use of clay as a means of artistic expression inevitably leads to an association with the divisions and hierarchies within the art world involving art/craft and nature/culture binaries that are intimately connected to sex and gender debates alongside a consideration of primitivism, modernity and post-modernity. These debates have relevance for a discussion of ceramic craft practice in contemporary Hong Kong and this dissertation draws attention to some of the issues facing the author who is also a practicing ceramic artist. The main focus of this essay is to reflect on the work, and to a lesser extent the lives, of Duckworth and Perry and more briefly Asger Jorn and Isamu Noguchi, whilst drawing some comparisons to the life of a practicing artist in Hong Kong who also works with clay, is female and originates from a different place from the one in which she currently lives and works.