Robert Cooper, Candle Stick Holder : Ornate, 2024
Every piece by Robert Cooper begins with a journey. The ceramicist’s studio in South London is a colourful archive of ceramics history, its shelves filled with fragments of daily life from the 14th century to the present day: shards of Victorian tobacco pipes, medieval drinking vessels, and Edwardian floor tiles living side-by-side.
Cooper has spent decades scouring the banks of the Thames for remnants of the past, collecting and reassembling the history of London and Kent waterways into collaged ceramic works brimming with personality. His walks have taken him from the Thames in London to the Kent estuary, following in the wake of centuries of bargemen for whom this was the beating heart of trade and industry. The traces of this industrial past are visible in Cooper’s new series of candlesticks, which feature fragments of Victorian ‘clinker’. Collected from the area surrounding a brick factory in Kent, these pottery fragments were burned to form a hard, concrete-like material, and the remnants of metals and oxides on their surface leave an iridescent trace of their past. In Ornate, an 1880s glass bottle, reduced and warped from its clinker past, sits alongside a shard of medieval kitchenware and Edwardian blue and white porcelain from Stoke-on-Trent, forming a collage of British history through found materials.
Ceramics are a lens into history, revealing the networks of trade and inspirations which have shaped our visual everyday. In Dark Triangle Bloater, Cooper makes an 1870s jar of bloater paste the pedestal for a 16th century tin-glazed plate, whose greenish glaze reveals the hand of an Italian ceramicist attempting to recreate prized Chinese porcelain. Each fragment is held together by what Cooper calls ‘bubblegum clay’: lumpy balls of clay which retain the footprint, or fingerprint, of the artist. In this way, his candlesticks feel a little like assemblage records of personal and social histories, cobbling together pieces of everyday city life throughout history with the bubblegum that we see so often on paving stones. He has recently begun learning the ancient technique of kintsugi, part of a long fascination with Japan and its material history. His work is, in its own way, a reinterpretation of kintsugi, celebrating the beauty to be found in the broken and the imperfect. Each piece encourages us to look again, reframing discarded pasts.
A series of new works by Robert Cooper are available now online or in our Marylebone gallery. His solo exhibition Holding to the light runs from 13th to 28th April at Gallery Kasper, Hayama, Japan.
