Robert Cooper
Ceramics, London
Robert Cooper is an established ceramicist who has exhibited widely in the UK and internationally. He is fascinated by the persistence of artefacts and ideas, and often uses found objects, such as pottery shards from the Thames foreshore, which are imbued with a previous life and function, as a starting point for his work. Robert has, for many years, employed recycling as a mode of working. Different elements such as clays, oxides and glazes left over from teaching sessions, discontinued ceramic transfers, printed imagery from popular culture and even pieces of previous work are recombined to create new narratives with multiple meanings.
‘Being an educator keeps me moving creatively. I usually hand build with slabs, as in my tea caddies with their layers of silk screen imagery and impressed surfaces, cardboard, stamps and gifted ceramic transfers. I gather cast off ideas, objects; the every day; a diary of my get up and go day.'
‘Using soft toys connects with our young family members - the charity shop finds, poignant with the passing of innocent times, giving toys the dip into casting slip reveals an awkward new story life to the figures as they settle into a hard future. I use cast-off glazes and ceramic colours from the end of my classes, and find not fully knowing the outcome exciting, a crack to be filled or not and made good, the survival of the fitting. My paintings fit together elements, found or registered and can take time to assemble. The new collages using stickers are an outcome of play and using the leftovers to create new stories.’
‘Trophies began with an invite to the Contemporary Applied Arts Cup show and my trophies evolved from balancing the past object with history, with today’s products , the throwaway coffee cup, cast in plaster and filled with casting slip, emptied to show the froth and using passed on ceramic imagery collaged to tell a story, like wise unusable, so you can indicate as a egg timer, the triumph of the past with nostalgic quality or the present redundant outcome, either way the sand falls.’