Output details

Curated Exhibition: ‘A Rough Equivalent: Sculpture and Pottery in the Post-War Period’.

The exhibition ‘A Rough Equivalent’ brought together sculpture and ceramics from the 1950s to the 1970s from the major collections at Leeds and York Art Galleries. Jones curated the exhibition during a Research Fellowship at the Henry Moore Institute, Leeds, in 2009/2010, where he worked closely with curators at Leeds and York. The exhibition, and an essay recording the research findings were the main outputs of the Fellowship. The essay was published by the Institute in pamphlet form (16 pages, ISBN 978-1-905462-33-9), and made available to exhibition visitors. There is little in the way of a documented shared history between sculpture and ceramics and Jone’s research addressed this deficit. The exhibition juxtaposed work by sculptors, including Kenneth Armitage, Ralph Brown, Geoffrey Clarke, F.E McWilliam and Eduardo Paolozzi, with that of ceramicists, including Dan Arbeid, Ian Auld, Hans Coper, Bryan Newman, Colin Pearson and Denise Wren. Bringing these figures together allowed a common aesthetic, particularly in the ‘rough’ treatment of artworks made between 1950 and 1980, to emerge. The essay identifies some of the striking similarities in form and texture between objects in the different media. These are in terms of surface scarification, jagged edges, ‘cut-out’ forms, distorted figuration, and the way materials are used to achieve these effects. Key works and similarities are also illustrated in the essay. The director of the Henry Moore Institute at the time was Penelope Curtis (now Director of Tate Britain). She invited Jones to curate ‘A Rough Equivalent’ as a continuation of the Institute’s longstanding exploration of the meaning of sculpture and its relationship with other art forms. The exhibition showed that the investigation of the relationships between sculpture and ceramics is overdue, and that an interest in ‘surface’ qualities shared between sculpture and ceramics had previously gone unnoticed.