Untitled (cobalt skull), Andrew Nicholls in collaboration with Yu Xuan and Jingdezhen artisans, hand painted cobalt on porcelain, 30 x 35 x 35 cm, 2016. Photograph by Bewley Shaylor.
Outrageously Aesthetic: The Art of Andrew Nicholls, by Macushla Robinson
When Perth based artist Andrew Nicholls was growing up, a ceramic meat platter hung on the wall of his parents’ house. The platter depicted a picturesque Italian landscape with ruins by a river, in the famous blue-and-white pattern of British ceramics factory Spode. The platter was a wedding gift to his parents from his “aspirational” aunts who ran an antiques stall. Years later it would become central to Nicholls’s career as an artist. After completing his sculpture degree he spent long hours in his tiny Perth studio, his drawing pad his primary resource, and it was then that he began rehearsing Spode’s iconic Blue Italian design from his childhood along with patterns by Wedgwood and Royal Doulton.
Commercial British ceramics, with their bucolic faux-Rococo landscapes blending Italianate and Chinese styles, might seem innocuous and quaint. Yet as affect theorist Sianne Ngai suggests, marginal aesthetics such as ‘cuteness’ are “a way of aestheticizing powerlessness [that hinge] on a sentimental attitude toward the diminutive and/or weak” (3/15). The sidelined status of British ceramics, which are categorised as ‘decorative arts’, reveals society’s aesthetic prejudices: the hierarchies that play out in taste.
Such objects have emerged out of historically specific circumstances that embody both class and colonialism. For many British and Australian families such possessions reflected a bourgeois desire to show their class standing. A piece of fine crockery symbolised your position in society, your heritage and your ability to have and keep nice things.
Such associations intrigue Nicholls, but his fascination goes further. His practice appropriates refined illustrative techniques and blue-and-white tones characteristic of British transfer-ware china. He applies his drawings to teacups and plates as decals – in a process akin to applying a temporary tattoo – or to paper, public walls and even the ceiling of the City of Perth Library using pens and Copic markers.
The content of his drawings bend from tradition. ln place of the mild-mannered landscapes and floral designs, Nicholls works depicts irreverent and fantastical homo-erotic scenes. His drawings of men have the languid quality of long hot summers. Almost always naked, his subjects recall classical antiquity as imagined by Bernini, Michelangelo and Donatello: a merman with a fish’s head and human body reclines on a platter; naked fairy-boys crouch on unexpectedly phallic mushrooms or dance with skeletons; Adonis sits astride a horse; a centaur tilts his head back to devour some grapes. The drawings are exquisitely detailed and painstakingly precise – labours of love that the artist spends months completing – yet they explode with barely concealed carnality.
Nicholls’ work seems only distantly related to the current wave of ceramic art within Australia and internationally. Much of this work, such as that of Ramesh Mario Nithiyendran, Trevor Fry and Emily Hunt has a certain wildness to it, the wilful messiness of the hand-made. His work is, however, closely aligned with a group of artists who subvert the blue-and-white and willow pattern and related designs: among them Danie Mellor, Robin Best, Gerry Wedd, Sarah Goffman and Vipoo Srivilasa. Nicholls’s work is intentionally classical; it is obsessive but not gestural or expressionist. Indeed the artist often describes his work as “deliberately cold”. His work is an uninhibited celebration of the male form, combined with an exuberant proliferation of imagery.
Nicholls describes his aesthetic strategy as “camping” on the style of eighteenth and nineteenth century ceramics. British commercial ceramics could be called camp in and of themselves: they are highly collectible, yet because of their sentimental and decorative nature they have been relegated to the sidelines of art history. They are picturesque, sensuous and often excessively decorative. To borrow a term from Susan Sontag in her 1966 essay “Notes on Camp”, camp art is “outrageously aesthetic”. She elaborates on the idea of camp as a verb: “To camp is a mode of seduction - one which employs flamboyant mannerisms susceptible to a double interpretation; gesture full of duplicity, with a witty meaning for cognoscenti and another, more impersonal, for outsiders“ (280). Nicholls’ drawings and ceramics have this capacity for double meaning. They playfully subvert the ‘proper’ style of British ceramics with their mischievous and raunchy subject matter. This is deliberate: Nicholls engages this aesthetic tradition precisely because it is so often dismissed, as though he were daring us to ‘write it off’.
This is not to suggest that Nicholls’ work is impersonal. As he points out, his love for his aunts’ platter is something of a “guilty pleasure”. Indeed his concept of camp sits somewhere between love and critique. “You can’t camp on something without loving it, but it’s a kind of guilty love that is completely aware of the failure of the aesthetic”, Nicholls notes, crediting Travis Keller’s The Ontology of the Closet (2013) as his reference for this definition of ‘camp’.
Much of Nicholls’ work is, at least in theory, functional. Commercial British ceramics are utilitarian – cups, plates and saucers that have an obvious function – yet they are rarefied and precious. So often the ‘good china’ is displayed in a cabinet or as in Nicholls’ case, hung on the wall. The inbuilt prohibition against touch only heightens the sensual charge of these ceramics, which were designed for the hand, yet resist it. Nicholls plays on this hidden sensuality.
This aspect led Nicholls to research the plate’s origins, a project that has included residencies at the Spode factory in Britain and more recently, at a pottery workshop in Jingdezhen - China’s foremost ceramic producing city. British commercial ceramics, which might seem like charming totems of another generation’s sentimental attachments are, he found, intimately bound up with the aspirational politics of class, indeed they are born out of British colonialism. Spode appropriated methods from China and fused with aristocratic foibles to create a hybrid design. The famous Blue Italian design, for example, fringes its Italian landscape incongruously with a decorative design of Chinese origin.
Nicholls’ research into Spode began with his love for the individual plate. However, the research undermines the purity of his love by revealing its political entanglements. The things that we loved as children get complicated as we get older and learn more about the historical conditions under which they came into being. Nicholls’ strategy is thus one of both love and betrayal: he holds onto the aesthetic of British commercial ceramics that is personally significant, while at the same time facing the political implications of their history; the twofold legacies of class and colonialism.
Perhaps because of Spode’s popular use of ltalianate scenes, Nicholls is also fascinated with the position that Italy occupied in the British imaginary of the time. Italy was the site of an early, aristocratic phase of tourism. Young English men would travel south to complete their arts studies. Commonly referred to as ‘The Grand Tour’, such trips were a privileged experience that fed into high British culture: as the artist notes, the neoclassical style has become associated with civic culture (for example the neoclassical colonnades that are the common frontage of public buildings) and yet the young men who went on tour were, to use Nicholls’ phrase, “awful spoilt brats”. The Blue Italian design is merely an echo of these tours, a souvenir collected by those who could not afford such a jaunt themselves.
Nicholls’ new commission for Artbank draws on this history, and the sensuality of classical antiquity, as if to remind us of the homoeroticism that is latent within this supposedly proper English tradition of the grand tour. Echoing Michelangelo’s II Giudizio Universale [The Last Judgement] 1536-41, the planned multi-panel drawing will feature Christ in the centre of the work flanked by various saints and angels, as well as Hell and the Four Horsemen of the apocalypse.
In a strategy reminiscent of ‘Choose Your Own Adventure’ novels, the panels can be arranged in two alternative configurations: in the first configuration all of the souls ascend to Heaven. Nicholls describes Heaven as a gruesome place. “I’ll depict all my favourite gory Catholic saints, such as Saint Lawrence, who was burned on a gridiron, Saint Bartholomew, who was flayed alive, Saint Peter of Verona, who is always depicted with an axe in his head, and of course Saint Sebastian, who I’ve wanted to draw for years”. The composition can be rearranged to become a long horizontal rectangle with Christ in the top left comer, and various demons stretching across the rest of the work. In this version all of the souls descend to hell, and the Four Horsemen transform into various demons from the Ars Goetia: a seventeenth century grimoire or book of spells and invocations.
The Artbank work, along with a series made in Jingdezhen in early 2016, using overt imagery of death, suggests a new direction for Nicholls. Recent work – including these porcelain skull and crossbones exquisitely painted with cobalt in a traditional Chinese design – shift emphasis from cheeky Eros to darker ruminations on human finitude, Catholicism and the afterlife. Of course, the Catholic tradition, in which Nicholls was raised, combines both. His work delves into this tension, holding open a space for both Eros and death.
Macushla Robinson, 2016
All quotes from the artist are from conversation with the author, 21 May 2016.
Jasper, Adam and Sianne Ngai. “Our Aesthetic Categories: An Interview with Sianne Ngai”. Cabinet Magazine: Forensics. 43, Fall 2011.
Sontag, Susan. “Notes on Camp”. Against lnterpretation and Other Essays. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1966.