As a material, clay is so closely bound to the act of creation that it and the process are practically inextricable, the one shaping metaphors for the other, all the way back to the myths that tell the stories of humanity’s conception. Prometheus, so the tale has it, moulded the goddess Athena from clay, animating her with a stolen sunbeam.  

The three artists in The Lowry’s current group show, Local/National/International, all work with the material, shaping it to their own ends. Brought together by curator Zoe Watson, it’s another pearl in her string of recent memorable commissions.  

Opening with The Essence, Renee So takes as her starting point the design of Qing dynasty snuff bottles, tracing through the adoption of their form by western perfumiers a history of colonisation and enforced trading. In doing so, she draws attention to the legacies of violence that their exoticised sleekness conceals.  

For her part, Aliyah Hussain builds worlds which are cross-pollinated from those dreamed of in feminist science fiction; realities given form not only through the clay that she cultivates into new organic structures, barbed and exotic, but in the soundscapes into which they evolve. To enter her installation She Was Waiting For Her Roots is akin to being teleported onto one of the sets for the original series of Star Trek. Having been nurtured from the seed of Anne Richter’s short story The Sleep Of Plants, and in keeping with its fable of refusal through transformation, Hussain’s piece brings into being a time and space dislocated from our own, and, through seated areas embedded in oversized pots, invites us to take a plant’s eye view of that reality.  

Of the three contributors, however, it’s arguably Paloma Proudfoot who casts ceramics into the most resonant images, fired by the tensions between the mute witnesses of paternalistic psychiatry in decades past and the voice that the present moment affords them. The starting point of her Lay Figure was her research into Charcot‘s treatment of female patients diagnosed with hysteria in Paris’s Salpetriere Asylum during the mid-19th century. Seen as the father of neurology, Jean-Martin Charcot‘s practice has the unique distinction of influencing both the work of Sigmund Freud, and his theories of the unconscious, and Andre Breton, writer of the Surrealist Manifesto, and one of that artistic movement’s own fractious progenitors.  

In some ways progressive, not least because he reformed the asylum into a place of treatment rather than one of simply warehousing the mentally unwell, in other ways Charcot was a more ambivalent figure, particularly in his use of hypnotism to induce the behaviours associated with hysteria for the edification of audiences, both medical and curious who attended his weekly lectures. It was also under his aegis that a number of volumes of extraordinary photographs, purportedly intended to improve diagnostic clarity, the Iconographie Photographique de la Salpetriere, were published. 

Beautiful, in the manner of the sleeve of a record by the Cocteau Twins but problematic in terms of the sitter’s consent, these are the ghosts that haunt Proudfoot’s re-castings. Attentively crafted, her responses are bold figurative works, in blazing glazes that add impassioned and compassionate colour to the monochrome ethereality of the images taken of Charcot’s patients, breaking the mould imposed upon them by the gaze of male authority and affording them the agency to define themselves on their own terms. Fractured and occasionally barely stitched together, they are nonetheless unmistakably women in the act of explaining themselves, rather than being explained away. 

The opening night performance at The Lowry, in which Aniela Piasecka, herself an artist and choreographer, performed as a medium for the stilled bodies of Charcot’s patients, beautifully enacted the tensions presented in Proudfoot’s work, in particular by evoking in the audience the discomfort of complicity, even at a century-and-a-half’s remove. Describing the concentric circles of séance and science, artifice and art, Piasecka untethered herself from the strings of a garment that was part apron, part straitjacket before herself taking a place in the audience. It made for a cathartic conclusion to one of the openings of the year; one that fully did justice to three women artists who, across their companion pieces, in working against the conventional mould, have fashioned alternatives, by turns contrarian and utopian.  

By Desmond Bullen, Chief Arts Correspondent

Main image: Paloma Proudfoot, Skin Poem, 2024

 

Local/National/International is at The Lowry, Salford until February 16, 2025. For more information, click here.