The Art Of Survival and the Ritual Killing of Objects (The Staffordshire Panther)
Peruvian pot
2012
Click the image for a
full size enlargement
3 / 3
Installation in the AirSpace Gallery window, following residency with the Potteries Museum and Art Gallery. Part of Conjunction 12.
My seven days went like this. I met the Museum curator Ian Vines to look around the stores, dowsing for the right object. There were lots of interesting artefacts – a 300 million year old tree; ‘Fossils Unknown’; the head of a prize bull – but somehow the thing that stuck was on the Peruvian shelf in ceramics. A black pot with a strange double tubular spout and the burnished face of a panther. Incredibly strange. I realised after a day or two away from Stoke that I was thinking of the pot as a real panther, it was alive. On the train back North I was reading The Old Ways by Robert Macfarlane (one of my favourite writers) and he described a fleeting encounter with a Big Cat on the Marlborough Downs. Travelling in on the train from Macclesfield, where I grew up, to Staffordshire, I was looking up sightings in the area. Looking out into broadleaf woodland, I came across Keith Mansfield’s account of his sighting nearby (really just through the trees) at Rudyard Lake.
Keith’s account, including a shaky, watery video clip and my painting of his google map of the walk he was on that day, plus the remnant material from the making, help form the new context for the panther head. My porcelain facsimile is the centre of a diorama showing a Staffordshire panther in its habitat. It’s a little bit about the death of myth.