For their third joint show Softly, softly, Charlotte Watson and Shannon Williamson use a combination of drawing and ceramics to explore disquieting notions of intimacy and vulnerability. Game animals and fragmented figures become metaphors for the fragility of memory, body and self in the face of outside forces. Softly, softly opens at 5.30pm, Tuesday 13 September, and runs through to 3 October 2022. Ahead of this, City Art Reader editor Cameron Ralston held a group Zoom video conversation with Watson in her Melbourne studio and Williamson in her Christchurch home.
Cameron Ralston: Where were you both coming from in making the works? I imagine you have quite a bit of commonality – both your works being shaped by things outside of your regular practice that were causing constraints in a way. Shannon, you talked about the necessity of working in a certain faster, more intuitive way and Charlotte, you mentioned having a more intermittent process and so finding materials that allowed for that.
Shannon Williamson: When we were making for the show we were discussing our immense time constraints for very different reasons. Something we’re both connecting to right now is this method of just having to work and switch on immediately when the time presents itself. We haven’t been able to turn up to the studio early and work as long as we want to over consecutive days. It’s finding half an hour or 10 minutes or a couple of hours, you never knew what you were going to get. For Charlotte and I a big part of our process is writing and drawing through ideas before we move towards the ‘finished work’. We both had to scrap back on a lot of that process. In a way, we’re showing the drafting process more in our finished works.
Gift for the family iii, pencil on paper, 400x297mm, 2022
CR: Are you able to see that drafting process in your ceramic works Charlotte, with them being sculptural objects?
Charlotte Watson: I’ve not made draft works in a three-dimensional way before. I do some sketches of the animals but I never have a final drawing of what this thing is going to look like because the clay determines the form in a lot of ways and it happens quite organically. So that part of the process has lent itself to me being able to do them over staggered periods in the studio. There’s nothing predetermined and I think that anyone using clay would say that. You can have all the best intentions, but the clay is going to determine what you do in a lot of ways.
Decoy (pair), porcelain, 60x180x95mm & 80x225x55mm, 2022
SW: So, the predetermined thing is important isn’t it? We both worked with no predetermined outcome. There was less control and more having to respond to what the material did at the time and accept that. The working process was controlling us more than we were controlling it.
CW: I would agree very much so from my perspective.
SW: It’s kind of scary, but kind of fun.
CR: Is it a way of working you’d both do again, or given time would you prefer to work as you have before?
SW: I’d love to have more time.
CW: I’d love to have more time too. But I think for me, this is a very simmered down version of how I’ve always worked anyway, in which I can do all the precursory research or writing or thinking but the outcome is always unknown. It’s just that this is particularly condensed and the focus has shifted. I think both Shannon and I would share the philosophy that if we’re making anything at all, we’re doing alright. The parameters and definitions have changed a lot for me in the last 12 months working my new job.
SW: Working with such immediacy meant having very little time to pause, reflect and refine. I had to get over fearing that lack of control. Once I started accepting this lack of control then acceptance became a daily process. It was really good for me – accept you don’t have control, accept that the baby just woke up and you’ve only have 15 minutes. The two options I had were to be really strung out and upset or to be like, ‘This is where you are in your life; this is what you’re working with’. I had a turning point about halfway through making this work where I felt really empowered to go wherever my brain was taking me without censoring myself, without thinking about how it all connects to work I’ve made before etc. like, ‘You know what? I’m having this feeling that I want to draw some weird kind of tongue thing… I’m feeling the mouth at the moment, and I need to draw about the mouth’. I make better work when I’m not over-thinking it.
Stutter stop ii, pencil on paper, 297x210mm, 2022
CR: In previous exhibitions you’ve worked with themes and then mapped them with your drawing. With this body of work, you didn’t have a preliminary research goal?
SW: No, I didn’t. All the work I make is always about the body anyway. Whether it’s mine or other peoples’, or some kind of relationship between them. But instead of coming up with a theme about the body, I was tapping into what my body was up to at a given moment. My drawings would start from wherever my anxiety was sitting in my body at the time. For example, does it feel like I can’t breathe properly? Can’t talk properly? Am I tired? Where is discomfort seated in my body in this moment? That’s what I was drawing. As I worked I came to more thematic ideas and that’s where the series titles come from. But they had to start from whatever sensation my body was connected to in that moment. If I tried to make myself draw stuff that I wasn’t feeling, I couldn’t do it. I can’t do any drawing in 20 minutes if I wasn’t connected to it.
CR: Looking at the works, they still fit very well within your practice. So having those previous works and visual language in a way allows you to work without thematic constraints.
SW: You’re right about the visual language. All those things you’ve done for years are within you, they’re your tools that feel like extensions of your body and they come to you whenever you’re working.
Rabbits, porcelain, 115x275x110mm, 2022
CR: What about you Charlotte – do your works have a theme or something you’re looking into specifically?
CW: I have been looking at the idea of hunting a lot recently and so the works that I’m bringing to the show are all invasive species to New Zealand. I think I’m less interested in the environmental conversation and more interested in the dynamic between the hunter and the hunted. A few of the animals I made have been introduced purposefully for sport. From a distance now I find there’s not much difference between talking about hunting deer and eradicating stoats – they just have a different outcome.
CR: Do the works take a stance on hunting?
CW: I don’t think they do. I’m not anti-hunting and not anti-conservation. I’m trying to look at the complexity of power dynamics and the idea of the trophy. Now that I’m using porcelain quite a lot, I think about the household ornaments that I grew up with. My mum had very romantic porcelain horses and stuff like that – I guess this is my modern contemporary take on those things people would have around their home to reflect their taste, affluence or culture.
CR: I’m interested in this idea of fragility that you’ve talked about. What is its meaning for each of you? Charlotte, there could be a fragility in the ecosystem side of things, and you’ve both talked about fragility of the body.
CW: For me you could look at fragility in terms of the material. There are no guarantees with porcelain. It’s also notoriously tricky to sculpt. Because of my lack of time, I’m conscious of concepts and thematics but I’m not knee deep in it, so I don’t bother giving the concept and how weighty it is too much emphasis because I am more concerned with the doing. The other part of the fragility would be the fragile state of my creative practice. Because I work in a very creatively demanding role facilitating the exhibitions and creative practices of other people, I have to carve out (maybe pun intended) this space to keep my own practice going as well.
SW: For me, ideas of fragility come through technically, like in my choice of lead pencil and fine paper (the paper is very vulnerable to humidity which I’ve noticed working at the kitchen table). My quality of line is also often fragile. I do a lot of work with my eyes closed because it helps me focus on translating the feelings from my body on to the paper without being distracted by what it looks like. There’s this fragile quality of line that I get from working with my eyes closed that is shaky, almost ready to break. Another thing I noticed is that, working in the kitchen, I don’t have any walls I can put the work up. Previously in a studio with works up on the wall I’d work in a dialogue between what I’d done and what I’m working on, so this time it was like working blindly. I had to put work away to work on the next one, which I found quite unnerving. That process for me felt fragile.
Even though I wasn’t directly working with a theme, I always work with the concept of the body which is inherently fragile. The ideas that kept coming up while making these works were those of femaleness and the messages we get about what the body ‘means’ in society before and after (or with or without) children. The ‘Time piece’ series in this show explore this. There’s always a fragility in our sense of self based on the choices we make or the things that occur within our bodies. I feel there are still so many eyes on the ‘female’ body, a lot of assessment on what we do or don’t do with them.
Time piece iv, pencil on paper, 400x297mm, 2022
CR: It’s good that you’re both seeing these constraints as opportunities to explore new ways of working and ideas. You’ve chosen Softly, softly for the title of the exhibition and for me, listening to what you’ve both said, it feels like it sits well with you both coming to some form of acceptance in the process of making work for this exhibition – being kind to yourself and your practice. Does that hold any truth for you?
CW: I think what you say is correct. What came to me is the dialogue that I have with myself when I come to the studio. Which is, ‘You can have all sorts of grand ideas Charlotte, but we’ve just got to accept what comes out and what you can manage’. This is going to sound trite but fanning that flame of intuition and creativity really gently while everything else is very overwhelming and overbearing. For me that’s where ‘Softly, softly’ comes from. We had other conversations about other titles like ‘Stutter’, around the ideas of intermittence. There’s a respect and gentleness in approach that ‘Softly, softly’ has.
SW: That really sums it up nicely.
Sparrows, porcelain, 65x175x70mm, 2022
CR: I’m interested in the dialogue you have with each other while you were making the works. What did that look like?
SW: It wasn’t as much as we have in the past – this is the third show we’ve had together. The other two shows we had – Element & As Above, So Below – were both in Melbourne, so this is our first Christchurch show together and we’re living in different cities now. In those previous shows we worked in the studio together and there’d be lots of intense conversation over wine and meals and checking in with each other in the studio during the day. But this time, in keeping with our massive time poorness, it was more quick phone conversations. A little, ‘Hi, how are you?’ then just straight into it. We’d also flick single line texts back and forth. So it was a bit like our working process, very business-like. We know each other well enough to know the bigger things behind why we make artworks.
CW: There was a bit of back and forth about whether I was going to put in drawings but I’m really happy that I’m just showing ceramics. I thought that drawing was the stronger and more immediate link between both our practices, but I don’t think that necessarily needs to be the case.
SW: We’d also send each other photos of our work. I had asked Charlotte about whether she’d put in drawings or prints as I was working on paper as well but when I saw her ceramics, I thought the ceramics spoke much more to where I was coming from and the work that I was making, even though materials-wise they were the most different. It was that sense of softness, being withheld and fragility. All those things we mentioned in our blurb spoke to me in her work and I felt the exact same in making my works. So even though they look very different the aesthetic and feeling was the same for me.
CW: There will be an element of translucency to both the bodies of works as well. In Shannon’s paper and in my work in the fins of the fish and feathers of the ducks and sparrows and ears of the stoats, they’re all translucent. By the time they’ve gone through two firings you can see light through them. With my works you can also see where my hands held them. They’re really textured but then, because they’re not glazed, I sand them down until they feel like bone. To touch them they feel really smooth and ghostly.
SW: That’s beautiful and it works really well with the unframed paper works. You’re talking about traces of your fingers where you held them, when I was working I also got the odd accidental finger mark. I really liked them and wanted to hold those marks so I rubbed my fingers in the conte. There’s something really enjoyable about embracing that finger mark trace.
