Great globby gouts of shiny cerulean blue glaze slump and slide in an arrested, fused avalanche on a bare red column that’s taller than me. Something like a turd nestles on top of a misshapen, pistachio-coloured cupcake, and gold and red tears pattern a wonky blue shape that’s grown like fungus from the floor. Blackish congealed lumps of goo erupt through a golden glaze, and burst out through dense ultramarine. The whole thing’s like a giant melting sundae, or one of those forms you might find next to a deep-sea vent where life should be impossible. All these startling, ravishing creations are by Hiroshima-born Takuro Kuwata, their surface treatment developed from the glazes and techniques employed to decorate the humble bowls used in the Japanese tea ceremony.
Kuwata’s work goes beyond taste, or beauty, or refinement, though it is undoubtedly the product of great skill and technical knowhow. His work is also one of the best things in Strange Clay: Ceramics in Contemporary Art at the Hayward Gallery in London. The show has everything from beautiful pitchers and pots to stupid, quasi-conceptual knick-knackery, from things that look as if they are crafted for some top-end boutique to overthought, misconceived craft that wants us to believe something deep and significant is going on.
Edmund de Waal’s small, simplified porcelain vessels crowd together in the misted plexiglass display cases that hang above our heads. De Waal tantalises us by keeping these little forms at bay and even provides a seating area so that we can contemplate their fragility and distance while thinking deep thoughts. But there’s only so far you can go with a lot of this stuff. I like ceramics. My father was a keen evening-class ceramicist who once built a raku kiln in our garden. Perhaps he tried to shove me in it for criticising one of his pots.
A rain of everyday objects is caught mid-fall down the walls, and piles up on the floor below. Greyish white porcelain handbags and hats, baseball caps and torches, high-heel boots, children’s shoes, bananas, telephones and hot-water bottles, guns and teddy bears. Most were donated by artist Liu Jianhua’s family and friends, and then recast. According to the artist, this tumble of objects recalls the detritus found after a plane crash. For some reason, there are lots of hammers and after a while you notice the repetitions. There’s that hat again, and another teddy bear. It is all a bit theatrical and mawkish. So, too, is the sweet-smelling, fairytale bower of foliage, twigs and greenery that Klara Kristalova’s fanciful and folkloric figures inhabit. Girls with insect wings blossom into flowers. A bloke with a horse’s head lurks, hands in pockets and someone with a boar’s head, dressed only in underpants, squats nearby. Maybe they’re all cruising. Other, slightly scary figures hang about and a girl is trapped in a tree. A stoneware version of Henri Rousseau’s 1897 The Sleeping Gypsy occupies another clearing in the glade and I thought the whole thing might be a perfume advert.
Instead, give me the trauma in Lindsey Mendick’s 2022 Till Death Do Us Part. I hated this at first but now I think I’m meant to. Mendick gives us a whole house of pain, infested with dozens of pottery rats, mice, cockroaches, wasps, moths, slugs (or are they caterpillars?), and a dead cat (host to yet more mice) to run amok around the kitchen and the dining room, the bathroom and the sofa – not to mention the staircase and the drains. A pallid octopus heaves itself out of the handmade ceramic toilet bowl. Apart from the furniture, everything from the copy of OK magazine to the electric plugs and sockets is fashioned from clay, including the dyspeptic, angry little notes the human inhabitants have left one another. You don’t know whether to call pest control or social services. Gleeful in its conception and execution, this was obviously all fun to make. Children in the audience will love the plethora of detail and the naughtiness.
Speaking of cephalopods, a giant ceramic squid is beached in a resinous, inky puddle on the floor of an upstairs gallery, and a long row of what look like squid or cuttlefish bodies, each with a different colour or glaze, all by Peruvian-born David Zink Yi, run round a corner of a wall. There is a great concordance between the bodies of these creatures – their shine and the translucency of their colouration and their ability to mimic their surroundings – and the materiality of the fired and glazed clay, with its satisfying heft and slipperiness.
I’m given a finger and offered to shake hands in Jonathan Baldock’s Facecrime, a series of columns decorated with puckering lips and grins. Arms protrude and hands grasp and clench. When he’s not sure what to do, he bungs more in. You can really feel the strain and effort to be wacky. More feet and spooky disembodied hands appear in Serena Korda’s oversized necklace, called And She Cried Me a River, and in Woody De Othello’s clunky glazed feet which mount virulent green stairs. Red lips grimace on a black jug and a finger tells us to hush. More fingers and toes sprout from the late Düsseldorf ceramicist Beate Kuhn’s small objects, which also resemble asparagus spears, anemones and other natural forms. Elsewhere lumps go phallic, droop and pout. Glowing globs, like the fluorescent eggs at the beginning of Ridley Scott’s movie Alien, beckon from black beds of lava, and erupt into psychedelic, iridescent columns.
Then there are the lovely things and delicate things and dreadful things and things I never want to see again. The wicked ladies that decorate Grayson Perry’s mock-Victorian pots and urns – cross-dressed 18th-century heroines with strap-ons and flintlocks and sex toys, conducting their tawdry, bewigged and corsetted adventures in a world of sleaze and tabloid headlines – are unfazed by anything, even here. “All the artists in the exhibition share a passion for the intensely tactile, physical processes of shaping and working with clay,” we are told. That’s like talking about the “joy of paint” or the joy of sex. It is never enough. The things people do with mud.
• Strange Clay: Ceramics in Contemporary Art is at the Hayward Gallery, London, from 26 October to 8 January.
