Video: Pandemonium: Roger Whitaker Pottery
2024 Author: Richard Flannagan | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-15 23:55
The pottery works of sculptor Roger Whitaker are overpopulated, just like modern big cities. There are too many people here, like in a group photo of a large team. But, like everyone else, Roger Whitaker's characters are limited by the scope of a photographic portrait. The British master's philosophical and social sculptures make you wonder how the human soul is changing in a densely populated world.
How much land does a man need? Three arshins, thought wise Leo Tolstoy: just for the grave. Roger Whitaker's pottery characters do not even have this modest garment. His people stick out of clay boxes (meaning concrete) like poor plants. The owner thoughtlessly planted them in a small box: either sparing money for a bigger flower bed, or deciding that it would be more fun for the flowers of life. Now these plant people live as best they can: they push back their neighbors, turn away from their neighbors in order to be alone with themselves and collect their thoughts, try to escape from the hateful box, leave the frame of the portrait.
Others, on the contrary, withdraw into themselves. They are about to close the ceramic doors, which, according to the logic of the sculpture, should crush a person. In the small windows behind which people are hiding, there are not even faces, but only their fragments. This is how little we know about those who surround us every day: a man flickered - and he is gone.
One small boat contains several figures. They have the same destiny, but each perceives what is happening in its own way. One of the master's ceramic works is called Hope, Faith and Despair. Three stages, successively replacing each other.
And our souls are not threatened with overpopulation? In them, as on this fragile ship, several views of the world coexist at once. The sea of life is so fickle. But whoever is the captain of your boat: hope, faith or despair, believe me, it will land on the beautiful shore.
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