We live in an age where sampling from other people’s work has become commonplace. In the music business, sampling and mash-ups of various kinds have been around for a long time and I love it when a favourite riff from the past turns up unexpectedly in a new release. But what about when the samples have a physical form – when your art is based on fragments taken from the work of others?
I ask this question because, a couple of weeks ago, I dropped into a talk by Cleo Mussi, a ceramic artist, who weaves fragments of pottery into new mosaic works, where the whole is genuinely much more than the sum of the tiny parts. Mussi breaks up the work of others to be used in new and interesting ways, often with a ecological message befitting her commitment to reusing and recycling what is already there.
Much of Mussi’s time is spent collecting and sorting ceramic treasures. The photograph below captures the heaving shelves of her workshop, where, as she says on her website: “Chinese ceramic meets Wedgewood, Poole sits next to Japanese porcelain and Staffordshire unites with Homebase to form a unique and motley collection of work”.
I understand the joy of foraging. In the National Glass Centre hot shop (where blown glass pieces are made) there are buckets of coloured glass that cannot be put back into the large glass furnaces that dominate the room. Instead, these pieces are destined for the skip where they may be used as an aggregate for road surfaces. In the mornings, before the glass students begin to drip dangerously hot glass into these buckets, I like to collect some of the more interesting pieces from the previous days disasters, for use in my own work. I sometimes feel guilty that a particularly lovely piece was the result of someone else’s effort – but generally I’m glad to have found a new home for it.