Roger Law: Satire to Ceramics Exhibition at SCVA
Its been roughly 14 years since I last went to the Sainsbury centre. I remember it because its when I was studying at the Norwich School of Art and Design (now the Norwich University of the Arts) and our course worked on a project to design promotional material for the visual arts centre. The only thing I can really remember is that there was an exhibition at the time called ‘Incommunicado’ where artists explored the ‘breakdown of communication’ in different media formats, which acted as the framework for the promotional artwork I was creating at the time. What made me think of the Sainsbury Centre initially is that I was watching the film ‘Ant Man’ and the Avengers HQ is modelled on the Sainsbury Centre itself, so as I lived just around the corner from it, I decided to take a look online to see what exhibitions were on.
Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts
There are two main exhibitions on at the moment, one covers Russian Art and the other was an exhibition on Roger Law: Satire to Ceramics. As tempting as the Russian art exhibition looked, I knew with my Tate Modern membership that there was an exhibition called Red Star over Russia at the Tate modern this year so I decided to mix it up. Speaking of past exhibitions, I also vaguely remember when I was displaying work for the D&AD new Blood Exhibition in 2006 that I attended a political satire themed exhibit at the Barbican Centre with a lot of work from Private Eye magazine. Being a huge ‘Have I Got News For You’ fan, I opted for the Roger Law exhibit.
Right: Roger Law and his Spitting Image, 1992. Left: Roger Law, Fogg Dam Charger, 2016. Hand carved celadon glazed porcelain. Photos by John Lawrence Jones.
Greeted into the exhibition by a hilarious orange caricature puppet of current US President Donald Trump (which I found out later may be used for a US resurrection of Spitting Image), the first half of the exhibition covered Roger Law’s origins and influences. While I was taken through a comical timeline of early political cartooning starting with James Gillray up to and including the 1984 creation (with Peter Fluck) of Luck and Flaw’s Spitting Image, I couldn’t help but feel I was being watched by the unsettling gaze and exaggerated features of the life size puppets of ‘popular’ 1980s politicians, in particular Margaret Thatcher. What struck me was that it seemed no-one was safe and that anyone in politics, entertainment and British culture of the era were subject to a lampooning.
Examples of the puppets that appeared in Spitting Image.
A long way away from puppet building and the wit and humour of Spitting Image, the second half concentrated on Roger Law’s world renouned ceramic work. Fascinated by the unique wildlife after moving to Australia and sending illustrated letters to his grandchildren in UK, he started to combine his illustrative prints with Japanese ceramics. Its clear to see the illustrative talent that Roger Law possesses as the ceramics are visually stunning in the way he combines his style of drawn wildlife that are not found in the traditional and precise design patterns of Japanese ceramics. In the pre-digital era of Spitting Image and also the tradition of Japanese pottery where everything was made by hand and master crafted with skill, what linked the two sides of this exhibition is not only Roger Law’s ideas, style and craftsmanship but also the combination of working with a highly skilled team to achieve his vision.
The best way I can describe my experience of this exhibition by combining the satirical element of Spitting Image and the ceramic craftsmanship is by using a loose oxymoron. Hilariously fascinating.
Check out the Roger Law exhibition at the Sainsbury Centre before it closes on April 8th.