Good afternoon everyone,

How are you doing? Very well, I hope. I went to a terrific exo at the Hayward last weekend, there was tons of amazing art and loads of it was by women. So if you get the chance, do go the the ceramics thing while it's still on. And if you don't get the chance, don't worry, because the best of the women in that show are right here at Fem Fri!

Let's start with Emma Hart and her ceramic windscreens, showing one image on one side and one on the other:

Here's some useful context on maybe why windscreens that I did not have until, like, thirty seconds ago:

the artist retells the story of a near-fatal car accident on the M20 motorway that she endured some 20 years earlier. In the installation, clothes irons and empty soap-dispenser bottles act as unlikely stand-ins for cars and people, acknowledging their presence without the need for photographic record. Similarly, in Car Crash (2011), Hart interviewed various people in cafés and other locations about car crashes they had been involved in. If the interviewee spontaneously used objects (e.g. salt cellars, teaspoons or cigarette packets) to demonstrate the position of cars or bodies, she photographed the table-top arrangement

https://www.frieze.com/article/focus-emma-hart

I was also a great fan of Magdelene Odundo's shapely pots. This one looks like it might like to nuzzle you out of curiosity:

I want people to take away from the exhibition the love of material in my work, the notion that actually making things comes from years of practice. There’s complexity in reaching a status where you can actually be more fluid. I wish I could say that I’ve made the perfect piece – if I’d done that, I probably would have stopped making years ago.

https://www.apollo-magazine.com/magdalene-odundo-interview/

When you go to this show, you're going to want to touch the art, and I regret to inform that you're still not allowed to touch the art. Lubna Chowdhary's work doesn't even seem particularly tactile in this image, but there's something about the intensity of the colours that made me want to interact with these pieces physically:

The legacy of Loos’s campaign against ornament endures in “sophisticated” minimalist design of the present day. Underlying Loos’s [Alex note: Not Anita Loos] objections to the exploitation of labourers and the obsolescence of fashionable designs, was an explicit connection between ornament and “primitive” cultures: “the natives, the Persians, the Slovak peasant”. Chowdhary’s riposte comes in swooping forms and blazing colour.

https://www.studiointernational.com/index.php/lubna-chowdhary-video-interview-erratics-mima-middlesbrough

I love this suspended sculpture by Rachel Kneebone. So delicate and perfectly caught up in itself:

I do not think porcelain is any more demanding than I am of it! We have developed a form of truce. Its nature and consistency change the longer it is subjected to air, which means that I have to continually be aware of this and change tools at specific points. It is more about understanding timing, as the porcelain body becomes less malleable due to time while becoming stronger, so you need to wait until certain 'states' are reached before building more onto that area of the work, unless, of course, you want it to collapse. This knowledge of the limitations of porcelain thus becomes a source of possibilities, because once known you can work with or against what is known.

https://www.widewalls.ch/magazine/interview-rachel-kneebone

Finally, this is a tiny photo from a much larger installation that I cannot recommend highly enough that you see in person. I tried to take the most Fem Fri appropriate photo possible for this one:

DID YOU KNOW I have actually read Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus. It was, of course, bad, but I also got one (1) good bit of advice from it, which is when you want someone to do something be sure to start your sentence with "please would you." Now you don't need to read a word of the book and I have shared with you how I go about expressing my desires as an action for someone else. Here's an interview with Lindsey Mendick:

Because of the tactile nature of clay, they feel like extensions of me, I work so closely with them and it feels so much depends on their survival. But yes, I find making in clay so therapeutic and helpful to staying calm and grounded. Because clay is so unforgiving and has so many ingrained rules, you have to be relaxed and give the medium the time and attention it needs, and learning to slow down and switch off is so important when your mind is prone to torturing you just for the hell of it.

https://dateagle.art/lindsey-mendick-interview/

Love,

Alex.