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Yahoo
08-03-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Carol McNicoll, potter behind playful 1970s works like Three-Spouted Teapot and Unravelling Vase
Carol McNicoll, who has died aged 81, was a pioneering studio potter whose witty, postmodern work transformed the ceramics scene in 1970s Britain. She belonged to a cohort of women who studied at the Royal College of Art in London, including Alison Britton, Elizabeth Fritsch and Jacqueline Poncelet. Their work was a rejection of aesthetic and technical orthodoxies and became known as the 'New Ceramics'. Instead of throwing tableware on the wheel or working in an abstract realm of 'pure' sculpture, Carol McNicoll made surreal slip-cast objects that straddled the sculptural and the functional. She treated ceramic history as a resource to be plundered, creating playful, often collage-like works. Sometimes these borrowings were literal, as in her Three-Spouted Teapot (1972), cast from obsolete moulds once used by Royal Staffordshire. She subverted expectations of the material, casting crumpled paper, fans, flowers or tinfoil with liquid clay to create trompe l'oeil tableware. Other works were inspired by textiles: Unravelling Vase (1980) appears to unspool, ribbon-like. Tea sets were cast from folded fabric and bowls, while platters and bowls were handbuilt from 'woven' or 'knitted' strips of clay. Alongside her studies, Carol McNicoll worked as a machinist for Zandra Rhodes. The fashion designer commissioned work from the student, including a set of pink coffee cups with hands for saucers. 'I'd give [Zandra Rhodes] a dinner service; she'd give me a frock,' she recalled. In life as in art, she relished playful flamboyance. Her friends included Andrew Logan, the artist and founder of the Alternative Miss World competition, and the architect Piers Gough. In exchange for one of her tea sets, in 1980 Gough redesigned the flat in a former piano factory in Kentish Town, where she would live and work for the rest of her life. While studying in Leeds, Carol McNicoll met Brian Eno, of the nascent glam-rock band Roxy Music. The pair had a five-year relationship, during which she designed stage outfits for Eno and his bandmate Andy Mackay – most memorably, Eno's high-camp cockerel-feathered outfit of 1972, which is now in the Theatre & Performance Collection of the Victoria & Albert Museum. Carol McNicoll is the only person with work in both the museum's theatre and ceramics collections. In 1973, she oversaw the cover design for Eno's debut solo album Here Come the Warm Jets, featuring a still-life photograph that includes one of her pieces. Carol Margaret McNicoll was born on Christmas Eve 1943 in Birmingham to David McNicoll, a Scottish engineer who often worked abroad, and Brigit, née O'Keefe, an Irish Catholic from Co Waterford. Although her mother died when she was 13, Carol McNicoll credited her with her love of kitsch ornamentation, thanks to the neo-baroque churches they frequented together. To her father she attributed her fondness for knick-knacks, due to the many souvenirs he brought home. After education at convent schools in Birmingham, Carol McNicoll studied for a degree in nutritional science at Solihull College of Technology but dropped out after a term. She found work as a wardrobe assistant at theatres in Birmingham and London in the early 1960s before doing a foundation course at Solihull College of Technology. She then studied fine art at Leeds Polytechnic from 1967 to 1970, focusing on film and pottery. She applied to both the film and ceramics schools of the RCA and was awarded a Princess of Wales Scholarship to study in its School of Ceramics and Glass from 1970 to 1973. Her work was met with consternation by craft traditionalists, but found an influential champion in the newly formed Crafts Advisory Committee (now the Crafts Council). In the 1980s her work became more geometric and abstracted, but it never abandoned its connection to function, however vestigial. She also dabbled in industrial design, producing ranges for Next Interiors with her friend Janice Tchalenko, and for Axis Diffusion. Although brought up in a Tory household, from her teens Carol McNicoll was a committed Leftist and during the 2000s her work became increasingly political. From 2003 until 2011, her fury at the Iraq War found expression through pieces that satirised American military and consumer culture – casts of toy soldiers, guns and Coca-Cola bottles decorate her cake stands and coffee sets of the period. Carol McNicoll was a lifelong collector of bric-a-brac, which she often cast to create composite artworks. She adored pattern and used both her own and commercially available transfers to decorate her work, alongside brushwork and sgraffito. 'I am entertained by making functional objects which are both richly patterned and comment on the strange world we have created for ourselves,' she said. In 1999 the art historian Tanya Harrod described Carol McNicoll as 'easily the most creative person I know'. This creativity extended to her home, a shrine to maximalism, with walls, ceilings and surfaces heavily decorated. It was the subject of several magazine features, most recently in The World of Interiors (December 2024). Her personal sartorial style was equally exuberant, consisting of a riotous assemblage of charity-shop finds and homemade garments, always paired with her trademark oversized spectacles. Carol McNicoll taught at Camberwell School of Art from 1985 until 2001, when she resigned in response to what she saw as the bureaucratisation of arts degrees. That same year, she was shortlisted for the Jerwood Prize for Ceramics. In 2002, with Jacqueline Poncelet, she co-curated 'Pattern Crazy', an exhibition at the Crafts Council's gallery. The New Walk Museum and Art Gallery in Leicester presented a major retrospective of her work in 2003. Her work is held by public collections in Britain and worldwide, including the V&A, the British Museum and the Crafts Council in London, the National Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne, and the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam. Carol McNicoll is survived by her son, Beckett Vester. Carol McNicoll, born December 24 1943, died March 3 2025 Broaden your horizons with award-winning British journalism. Try The Telegraph free for 1 month with unlimited access to our award-winning website, exclusive app, money-saving offers and more.
The Guardian
02-03-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Leigh Bowery! review – a colossal display of shapeshifting outrageousness and originality
Life was a guise to the performance artist Leigh Bowery (1961-94). His looks were so outlandish, his costumes so teemingly various, they jam every inch of this huge retrospective. He is a gilded boy-god, a Christmas pudding on legs, a prosthetised Venus of Willendorf. He is a leather-clad dame in a zipped-up mask or a Regency dandy in pistachio pantaloons, their orange polka dots spreading upwards all over his face. He fills the frame every time, in period photographs and videos, an enormous Australian with a shaved head and powerful calves, standing 6ft 3in and higher in towering platform soles painted scarlet or silver. Even though he is long gone, a sense of his colossal presence is apparent from the opening gallery, where a rack of Bowery's earliest costumes gives an immediate sense of his size. He had left a quiet Melbourne suburb for London in 1980, and was wearing patchwork coats and tweed jackets with hillbilly hats. The first of many portraits in this show, a tentative drawing by the fashion designer Rachel Auburn, shows him in a baseball cap before he has shorn off his hair. For a moment, it seems as if this going to be a V&A show, gorgeously fashion-conscious, one costume after another in elegant vitrines. But playing alongside is a hilarious film of Bowery and his pals, already post-punk, getting into frocks and police hats in the Stepney flat where he lived for the rest of his life, lined with kitsch Star Trek wallpaper. Waiting for the dancer Michael Clark to arrive, they turn gossipy and fractious. It is like a souped-up scene from EastEnders. Soon we are at Taboo, the nightclub Bowery hosted in a Leicester Square basement on Thursdays, and Clark is flat on the floor with a half-clad lover. Snapshots cover the walls, music booms out. A beautiful monochrome photograph by David Gwinutt shows Bowery and his unrequited love, Trojan, in Picasso-inspired makeup and glittery hats outside the club. Trojan will die at 21 of an overdose. An early diary, Bowery's handwriting cast on a large scale, like everything about him, ponders the question of whether to change image. It is almost poignant, when you consider what is to come. He will burst through drag and bondage, couture, carnival and masquerade to create personae without parallel. Here is his famous dalmatian dress and mask, the vast pinstripe suit caked with sequins he wore to Andrew Logan's Alternative Miss World, the unitard he used to conceal his wife, Nicola, during the 'birthing performances', when she would emerge from between his legs. Headpieces with glowing lightbulb ears, lace neck corsets, thick facial makeup that conceals him entirely, the trademark egg splat dripping down over his skull in every colour of latex and paint. His shapeshifting is sometimes reminiscent of the French artist Claude Cahun, especially the sunburst masks, padded skirts and goggle eyes. But Bowery's body is not just a complex instrument of self-portraiture; it becomes a living sculpture: a majestic column, a strutting vector with a pompom for a head, at one point so completely concealed in white Lycra that the spreadeagled form no longer appears human at all. The whole show is evocative not just of another era in music, dance and performance art, but also the media. There are vividly inventive magazine shoots here for i-D, Blitz and the Face – currently having its own celebratory exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery – as well as for the press. And in a droll sequence for BBC One's The Clothes Show, Bowery spends a day at Harrods in spangled hoods and sequined trapeze dresses, parodying the stunned punters. Auntie would never broadcast such programmes today. Bowery went on to design costumes for Clark's dancers, who perform on pointe in massive platforms and tights with the bum missing to music by the Fall in American video artist Charles Atlas's jump-cutting film. Bowery toured with the troupe, bringing back wild variations on Noh costumes, plus an extra layer of couture cutting from Japan. (It is a pity this show makes nothing at all of his ability to stitch staggering get-ups from old curtains.) And then he becomes an artwork in himself, posing daily in front of a two-way mirror in Anthony d'Offay's gallery in 1988. Cerith Wyn Evans's contemporary video records every kind of vox pop response, from the baffled to the liberated, at the spectacle of the great exhibitionist as installation. There are many portraits in this show, climaxing, inevitably, with Lucian Freud's nude studies of Bowery lolling, sleeping, or splayed on the ground with one leg cocked, lending a monumental defiance to both his own nakedness and Freud's heavily worked painting. Bowery is said to have nicked an unfinished work from Freud. What is missing from this show is any hint of his wilful grotesquerie, either, pissing and defecating in small clubs onstage. Grimy footage of Bowery laboriously giving birth to his wife gives an inkling of his later performances, however, in stark contrast to Fergus Greer's stylish photograph of the couple bound together. Sign up to Observed Analysis and opinion on the week's news and culture brought to you by the best Observer writers after newsletter promotion But there are words as well as images at Tate Modern. And perhaps this is where Bowery's feelings emerge, in postcards to friends, all exuberant emotion and explicit humour, and in his A3 diaries. An entry from 1990, after a high hit of a show, reads: 'Hungover, depressed, full of regrets, no money.' Bowery already knows he is going to die. He kept his illness secret, telling his sole confidant to explain his final absences as a trip abroad. Tell Them I've Gone to Papua New Guinea was the title of Fitzrovia Chapel's Bowery show in 2022, on the site of the Middlesex hospital, where he died of an Aids-related illness in 1994. This retrospective grows harsher, darker. The shapes become more bulbous, the forms more exaggerated. Some of the images are sinister as well as ugly. Even in his civvies, Bowery liked to wear wigs, ill-fitting jumpers and a strip of tape to yank one eyebrow awry. He wanted, he said, to be like that 'weirdo in the street that you tell your mum about'. But look at his denim jacket fluttering with gold feathers, which turn out to be nothing more than thousands of blond hairpins, or his beard of bristling pegs. Or the multicoloured ribbons wound around his naked body like shining reels at John Lewis. Make yourself new every day. This is what stuns, in the end – this extreme originality. No matter what body you were born with, or how shocking you might appear to others, Bowery's work is a lesson in looking – and living – like nobody else. Leigh Bowery! is at Tate Modern, London, until 31 August
