Last autumn, at the Whitechapel Gallery in east London, the Chicagoan artist Theaster Gates exhibited works in clay: large, heavy, wrought objects, shaped by hand, formed with intense heat and effort. In last week’s intermittent summer sunshine, outside the Serpentine Gallery in west London, he opened Black Chapel, a timber cylinder clad in dark roofing membrane, its interior divided by an off-centre wall into a larger and a smaller part. It is this year’s edition of the Serpentine’s annual pavilion, a temporary structure usually designed (but not this year) by architects.
It is light where the clay works are heavy. Its charred tone might prompt a thought about energy: how many pavilions would have to burn to fire one of the ceramic pieces? Its early inspirations include the historical, bottle-shaped kilns of Stoke-on-Trent’s potteries, but the design has gone through some evolutions towards something more spare. It now more nearly resembles other kinds of working structure, the silos and granaries of midwestern agriculture.
