A counter-hegemonic craft? Exploring the potency of porcelain in an anticolonial art practice

这个基于实践的研究项目将着眼于殖民商品的情感潜力，特别关注瓷器，以挑战对帝国历史和遗产的共识。它将从美学、哲学、政治和社会学的角度探讨这一问题。我的艺术实践根植于工艺过程和材料的概念性使用，将成为学术研究的试验台和展示平台，与学术研究的发展和传播密不可分。我将探讨瓷器作为一种雕塑材料，作为一种具有象征价值的殖民商品的潜力，以及它在多大程度上可以用来对抗殖民历史上占主导地位的霸权，但却不稳定地脆弱和白色的观点。这方面的研究是及时的、相关的和紧迫的。现在，英国社会比以往任何时候都更需要与种族主义打交道，我对探索艺术家如何为此做出贡献很感兴趣。正如保罗•吉尔罗伊（Paul Gilroy）所强调的那样，“种族和种族主义都不是作为主要受害者的少数民族独有的历史财产”。拆除白人至上主义和揭露帝国历史的粉饰不是有色人种的工作。白人必须做这项工作，并认识到种族主义在很大程度上是一个当代问题。正如阿雷拉·阿祖莱所说，我的目的是，这项研究将有助于“忘却帝国主义”。她的《潜在的历史》将是我在这个项目中努力摆脱帝国主义认知方式的重要指南。我个人对创作有关殖民历史的作品的兴趣源于我的大家庭丰富但有时颇具争议的背景混合——祖先来自殖民奴隶制分裂的双方；对帝国与激进派黑人竞争的强烈怀念。十多年来，对帝国贸易原材料的概念性使用一直是我艺术实践的核心。我用殖民时期的商品创作艺术的方法是根深蒂固的工艺思维，我打算用这个学科来发展与这些原材料的亲密关系。我想继续我在金史密斯学院（Goldsmiths College）的硕士论文中开始的研究，探索与“充满活力”的物质接触的作用和影响。瓷器将是主要的参考，但我想运用工艺过程来获得甘蔗渣、棉花、胭脂虫、铜、靛蓝、橡胶、茶、糖和盐的情感活力。这将构成我对他们的历史和特征所产生的纠缠和政治共鸣话语的调查的基础。西方特权收藏家和制造商对瓷器的崇拜，使其具有令人担忧的象征意义，但在其历史的叙述中却没有得到充分的批评。埃德蒙德·德·瓦尔在《白路》一书中回避了它与权力和特权的联系。但也许正是它的白色、被感知到的纯洁和原始的暴躁，既能体现政治上的白色，也能与之抗争，使它成为一种恰当的材料，以艺术方式揭露对殖民历史的粉饰。

This practice-based research project will look at the affective potential of colonial commodities, with a particular focus on porcelain, to challenge the consensus on the history and legacy of empire. It will engage this line of enquiry from an aesthetic, philosophical, political and sociological perspective. My art practice, rooted in craft processes and the conceptual use of materials, will be both a testbed and exposé of the academic research, integral to its development and dissemination.I will explore the potency of porcelain, a colonial commodity laden with symbolic value, as a sculptural material, and to what extent it could be used to counter the dominant hegemonic, but precariously fragile and white, view of colonial history. This line of research is timely, pertinent and urgent. Now, more than ever, UK society needs to engage with racism, and I am interested in exploring how artists can contribute to this. As Paul Gilroy emphasises, "neither race nor racism are the exclusive historical property of the minorities who are their primary victims". Dismantling white supremacy and exposing the whitewashing of imperial history is not the job of people of colour. White people must do the work and recognise that racism is very much a contemporary problem. My aim is that this research will contribute to an "unlearning of imperialism", as Ariella Azoulay puts it. Her Potential History will be a crucial guide in my efforts in this project to disengage from imperialism's ways of knowing. My personal interest in making work about colonial history stems from my extended family's rich, but sometimes contentious, mix of backgrounds - ancestors from both sides of the colonial slavery divide; vocal nostalgia for empire vying with bouyant radical blackness. The conceptual use of the raw materials of imperial trade has been at the heart of my art practice for over 10 years. My approach to making art with colonial commodities is deeply engrained with craft thinking and I intend to use this discipline to develop an intimate affinity with these raw materials. I would like to develop research I began for my Masters dissertation at Goldsmiths College that explored the agency and affect of engaging with 'vibrant' matter. Porcelain will be the main reference, but I want to apply craft processes to access the affective vibrancy of bagasse, cotton, cochineal, copper, indigo, rubber, tea, sugar and salt. This will form the basis of my investigation into the entanglements and politically resonant discourses that their history and characteristics generate.Fetishised as it is by privileged Western collectors and makers, porcelain has a fraught symbolism that has not been adequately critiqued in accounts of its history. Its associations with power and privilege are skated over by Edmund de Waal in The White Road. But perhaps its very whiteness, perceived purity and raw fractiousness can both embody and contest political whiteness, making it an apt material for an artistic exposé of the whitewashing of colonial history.