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Jeannie Mah: History + Memory 2 =
This work has allowed me to reflect upon my historical connection to a specific
physical site, and a chance to take an intellectual inventory of my ceramic history.
Travel plays a role in my artistic practice which is neither direct nor evident. I
believe that my physical presence in various countries actually propels my work forward. When
I visit museums, my subjectivity responds to the locale and the institution, as well as to the
objects on view. During my seemingly random global meandering, certain geographical points
ignite artistic inquiries. Without warning, small portions of specific museums become lodged
in the back of my mind. Silently and imperceptibly, little objects slide into my memory, only
to resurface later, to demand attention.
My twelve year obsession with the cup began quite accidentally. The points of reference
have been a Kamares Ware Cup from the fourteenth century BC, seen in
the Heraklion Museum in Crete, and teacups from eighteenth-century France, seen in the
Musée National de Céramique à Sèvres, in Paris.
Neither of these objects that became points of fixation (the latter grafting itself
conceptually onto the former) was my intended subject of study. In Greece, I had intended to
look at Cycladic art; in France, I had wanted just to learn French. Ha!
When I was granted the Regina Civic Art Collection Commission in 1992, I proposed to make
a work for City Hall, because its site, the 2400 block of Victoria Avenue, is where I grew up.
Long gone now are the Willingdon Grocery (Our home), the adjacent
shops, the neighbouring houses, and the Mercy Hospital. To work on this project has assuaged
by senses of loss, place, history and childhood. The resulting work "History + Memory 2 =" is
now permanently installed on the fourteenth floor in the City Manager's office.
Reconstructed from fragments of histories, images and memories, the title "History +
Memory 2 =" announces a tri-part structure which attempts to speak of the wanderings of people,
objects and ideas.
The language of porcelain speaks of a travelling heritage activated by economic
migration. Over the centuries, as porcelain journeyed from East to West, commercial factors
modified the Chinese export wares to suit foreign tastes, while the importing nations adopted
Chinese motifs (Chinoiserie) in their fledgling industries. Colonization and the industrial
revolution filtered down European idea(l)s and products to North
America.
In the twentieth century, my parents migrated from China via the Pacific Ocean to
settle in the centre of the North American land mass. Obliquely and conceptually, my own work
has circumnavigated the globe in two directions to meet in Regina. The confluence of the
diaspora of pots and people merges with the point of intersection of ceramic, civic and
personal history to make Regina the site of meaning for this work.
Yet, this exact geographical point is immediately unsettled by the nonfixity of history.
Institutionalized forgetfulness, denial and erasure engender a misunderstanding and misconception
of time and place. Previous histories recede as physical space is transformed, but personal
memory clings to fragments of a past, so that a fragile reality may be mythologized as it is
recalled. The distorted lens of history creates a gap, which, with an historicist's eye toward
ceramics, I seize as a point of departure for a continual yet critical reinvention.
Having made elastic several millennia of ceramic history, I employ a pseudo-museological
(re)presentation as I reinsert invented, reflects or neglected histories into "History +
Memory 2 =." The cups, in the process of formation and transformation, are caught in a
static moment. History congeals them, lifeless and out of context. Yet, histories and memories
are reshaped and reinvented as they are remembered. Forms, images and ideas are in a continual
state of flux, finding stasis only in a moment of remembered history.
In the central panel, "Memory: The Personal (from Victoria Avenue and McIntyre Street
(Regina) to Minoan Crete and back again)," I use the tradition of the commemorative cup
to my own purposes. An image of a little girl of immigrant parents surrounded by North American
advertising, in front of the family store (our home), is placed onto a simple cup whose handles
aspires towards Sèvres. In this way, I reinsert the neglected history of the Chinese grocery
an the lively neighbourhood which existed before the construction of this City Hall. The other
cup makes reference to Sèvres only by its "commemorative" iconography; the image
on the cup is the referent of the cup. These two cups revolve around a teapot inspired by Minoan
pots, patterns and imagery.
Connotations, ideals and politics also migrate with objects and people, and are
continually in flux as they are retranslated into a new context. If this seems a contradiction,
so is the phenomenon of dispersion. Nothing remains pure. Themeeting and
merging of cultures is a two way street. In this new socio-cultural context, objects embued
with certain ideals must realign or change. New environments reveal inconsistencies between
ideology and reality. Mimesis, assimilation and acculturation reveal the struggles within and
between identities as they produce new hybrids of pots and people
During the final years of the twentieth century, as I produce pots that make references
to specific historical objects, I am finding that my pots have become materially perverse. Their
(hypo)critical stance speaks of their fragile materiality, yet their physical existence is
threatened by the very nature of their materiality. I make pots that find it difficult to
survive. (sotto voce: sigh!) During my process of inquiry, have I out-fumbled myself? Or, does
this situation only produce pots which speak of their own unavoidable destruction? Are these
only seductive surfaces masking discontent? Nihilism in fancy dress? Is this a true state of
existence - the fact of impending disintegration from within a moment of beauty? I fear that my
constant doubt and questioning will only lead to my own ceramic extinction. Self-reflexivity to
the nth degree!
Jeannie Mah |
