A l e x i s R A g o : C h A o s C o n t A i n e d

s i m o n o l d i n g

A l e x i s R A g o :

C h A o s C o n t A i n e d

A l e x i s R A g o :C h A o s C o n t A i n e d

Essay

s i m o n o l d i n g

Photographs

A l e x i s R A g o

I nt roduc t ion

l A u R A m A b b u t t

Alexis Rago: Chaos Contained

is a tour ing show from

The National Centre for Craf t & Design.

Protoangel • Normanby by Spital

The first time I saw Alexis Rago’s work was in 2009 at the 20-21 Visual Arts Centre, I immediately knew that this was an artist I had to work with. Alexis Rago possesses a magical combination of technical skill, knowledge of his material, conceptual integrity, and an eye for visual impact, all of this resulting in a powerful outcome which makes his work so enjoyable to experience. But this exhibition goes back much further than my first encounter with the artist, in Rago’s own words, ‘this exhibition has been thirty years in the making’.

Apart from the above, the thing that makes Rago’s work so successful as exhibitable objects is the balance struck between complexity and simplicity. Aesthetically, and from afar, the work has a simple, symmetrical beauty that seems to satisfy the eye on an unconscious level, which is what makes Chaos Contained such a stunning exhibition to enter. Approach the work, however, and layers of intricate detail and interest delight the viewer as they get closer. The same principle applies to the

abstract part of the work. Rago’s sculptures are as complex in concept as they are in the flesh, as if each pinprick within the material itself holds some new and interesting idea, yet, because the sculptures explore such fundamental notions, they speak to their audience on an almost instinctive level. They represent things that we, as human beings, can relate to on the simplest of planes or merely even as pure physical spectacle.

Rago has used this exhibition as an opportunity to unite and take stock of his work up to this point and also to explore some new directions. Digital media has been utilised by Rago to accompany past works, but here this notion has been taken a step further by including these digital elements within the body of the works themselves, adding another dimension and creating a more holistic object. Audiences now have an opportunity for a more sensual appreciation for the work and its context and therefore connect on an even deeper level than before.

Laura Mabbutt Curator, NCCD

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Introduct ion

Alexis Rago’s dramatic exhibition is, I think, about three things: ambition for minutiae; ambition for scale; ambition towards deep content.

Perhaps the very first thing that strikes the viewer – even more than the bravura size and f lagrant balance of some of the work – is the precious and painstaking detail of each individual piece. No clay surface is left unworked by hand. As a technical achievement this body of work has a kind of ‘Victorian’ energy behind it. I am thinking of spectacularly, cavernously-large, profoundly-embellished vases by the great pottery firms such as Minton or Wedgwood where every technical challenge has been triumphantly exceeded; where porcelain or stoneware did things beyond the reasonable call of technology and even science, and where the resulting pieces were shown to fanfare and amazement in the Great Exhibitions of art and design.

A lexis Rago: Chaos Contained

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But I think too of the way that the great Victorian designer Christopher Dresser used references to the natural world (albeit in a new aesthetic) to produce highly inventive functional pieces such as the Sea Urchin Vessel for the Linthorpe Art Pottery. Or, in an earlier age of experimentation, the subtle, exacting, precise lines of Italian maiolica from the Renaissance, impossibly drawn onto wet tin glaze, like ink onto blotting paper.

But what drives this body of work into its concern for the spectacle of the microscopic is less a concern for precision or exactitude for their own sakes. The zoomorphic forms which are presented call to mind the wonders of the natural world, the possibilities of imagined things beyond our ken. They have been brought about by the mind of the scientist, as well as the artist. These disparate approaches have melded into a coherent whole.

I thought, looking at these bleached forms, of fossils and beaches, treading on coral remains or the desiccated, infinitesimally reducing nuggets of f lint, shells of tropical or Atlantic hues, the detritus of eroded organic life, the ordinariness of scorched, intense, natural things. Alexis Rago, it seems to me, is also thinking about these

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matters as he makes these new artefacts: coral-like, spiny like a sea urchin.

And I also thought about the way that a Victorian curator and collector would have marshaled this evidence for the purpose of public instruction. In Exeter’s Royal Albert Memorial Museum, for example, where the Echinoderm collections gifted by William Percey Sladen, with their ghostly-white professionally-categorised specimens, are set out in a Mahoganey-cased museum room of learning unchanged since the early twentieth century.

In fact, I rather found myself being immersed in Rago’s exhibition as if I were in such a room: where taxonomy was in full swing. Although, of course, I was present in a room of unreal things, where the discipline was art rather than natural history, sculpture rather

than biology. What connected these matters was the search for an order and an exacting control, over each individual object, over the combination of parts that made up each astonishing object, of the combination of elements at the limit of their tolerance. The gathering of these materials into coherent and yet eccentric, individual forms, bristling with stems or antennae, make this an imaginative natural history: perhaps a natural history through a filter of science fiction.

If you take the view that you are ‘inside’ the exhibition, as if inside the collector’s cabinet, then what emerges beyond the fascination with such tenderly-manipulated surfaces and the mathematics of putting them together, is an awe at the balance, poise and majestic scale of the pieces: their sculptural weight as well as their seeming lightness. For this is also work about opposites: the tiny components and the immense clay sculpture; of the finished work and the fragments of unfired stoneware that line the f loor under some of them, like the desiccated remains of an archaeological dig. Of silence and sound; of darkness and light.

The dancing of digital light on one of the larger works in the exhibition is reminiscent of the way that the sea washes over the foreshore. A gravitational ebbing of ultra-violet, sometimes mossily-edged.

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From the deep interior of another, there comes the sound of scraping, or glassy tinklings, a percussive chorus to the work. They are in Rago’s words, aural notes that offer, ‘a reconciliation between the past and the present’.

Alexis Rago says that Chaos Contained has enabled him to ‘render something vulnerable’. I take this to mean that he has pushed his clay to the limits, but perhaps also that he has tested the way that art, sculpture, ceramics, science, natural history and the musings between them have supported, in a collegiate way, the multiple meanings of the exhibition. This is an exhibition that is pleasingly impossible to categorise. It is based on the merging of sound, light and hard, tactile surfaces. It has a sense of theatre, too, and it is perhaps not fanciful to think about each visitor walking delicately around each sculpture at a respectful distance, as it is both strong and fragile, as if in some sort of quadrille. Rago talks about how his wife, Janet, and he both ‘dance’ around each other in their chapel-studio.

There is also a sense of being at peace in this exhibition, for all of the contortions of the material, the kind of peace that one may find

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more often, say, in a museum of the history of medicine or biology, where the natural wonders of the world have been assembled and categorised for the purpose of pedagogy, but which retain a certain dignity and poise in their eternal lifelessness. Rago comments that he is seeking ‘to create a feeling of wonder’ and a ‘celebration of being in the world’. He achieves this by the making and curating of a deeply-layered exhibition, commenting of the interlinking of what he calls ‘architectural, religious and conceptual space’. It is a kind of communion with the deep past.

Chaos Contained calls to mind aeons of time; imagined places of worship and the very first steps of humanity; and a sophisticated, humane, watchfulness.

Si mon ol di n g

Professor Simon Olding is a writer, curator, and Director of the Crafts Study Centre, University for the Creative Arts. He is currently a Patron of Stroud International Textiles, a Trustee of Unravelled Arts and Deputy Chair of The Leach Pottery.

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Alexis Rago has been working and exhibiting both in the UK and

abroad for over two decades. In recent years he has focused on

the relationship between science and religion in the context of

evolution and sacred art. Ceramics are his chosen material with

which he explores these ideas in sculptural form creating objects of

the mind that position biological ideas in a variety of contexts.

His work is a synthesis of contrasting and often contradictory

influences, as he says himself in the documentary film Chaos

Contained, “all of these influences and ideas have given me, almost

a schizophrenia in my approach to my work”.1 The resolution of

these tensions has led to his forming the world and life view that his

work represents in terms of its material and philosophical content.

He studied fine art at the Institute for Art and Restoration,

Florence. He is an honours graduate in biology from the University

of Manchester and a Fellow of the Linnean Society of London, the

world’s oldest extant natural history society.

The sense of touch plays an essential role in the way Rago engages

with his ideas; he views tactile experience, with its origins in the

deepest biological ancestry, as a fundamental and primal way of

navigating the world.

1 Chaos Contained, 2013. [video] UK: Knowmedia [Producer], National Centre

for Craft and Design [Commissioner]. Available at: http://vimeo.com/73698857

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Biographica l

All works named from left to right are fired stoneware unless otherwise stated.

Front cover: In the Amplitude of Time Nothing Collapses (detail)

Opposite title page: cast shadows of Everlasting and Impermanent

Page 2: Eden, pinhole photograph; Extinct Possibilities; Great Progenitor

Page 4: Everlasting and Impermanent, fired and raw stoneware, digital audio (detail)

Page 7: Trillions of Winters andSummers (detail)

Page 8: Urluberlu from Trillions ofWinters and Summers; Time Passesand Things Stay the Same, withprojected video; Everlasting andImpermanent (detail)

Page 11: In the Amplitude of TimeNothing Collapses, with mirror (detail)

Pages 12-13: left to right: Everlasting and Impermanent; centre table: Trillions of Winters and Summers; rear wall: Eden; Extinct Possibilities; Centre: Time Has No Concept of Living Creatures; Great Progenitor; on shelf: I Feel Something I Cannot Put Into Words; Priest; Protoform; Philosopher; Sentinel

Page 14: Persephone; In the Amplitude of Time Nothing Collapses; Ex Machina, video

Pages 16-17: Time Passes and Things Stay the Same; detail

Page 18: In the Amplitude of TimeNothing Collapses; Persephone

Pages 20-21: Everlasting and Impermanent (detail); I Tremble at the Sound of Your Footsteps

Page 22-23 background: Time Has No Concept of Living Creatures (detail)

Back cover: Extinct Possibilities (detail)

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Lis t o f Images

Published by Protoangel 2013The Chapel, Normanby by Spital, LincolnshireLN8 2HG UKprotoangel@btinternet.com

Design and artwork production: ProtoangelReprographics and print: SaxoprintPrinted in Germany

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Datacatalogue record for this book is available fromthe British Library

ISBN 978-0-9568802-1-5

Text © authors 2013Images © alexis rago 2013

All rights reserved. No part of this publicationmay be reproduced, stored on a retrieval system,or transmitted in any form or by any means,without prior permission of the publishers.

Alexis Rago: Chaos Containedis a touring show fromThe National Centre for Craft & Design.

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Chaos Contained cal ls to mind aeons of t ime; imagined places of

worship and the ver y f i rst steps of humanit y ; and a sophist icated,

humane, watchfulness. Simon Olding

Alexis Rago: Chaos Contained

is a touring show from

The National Centre for Craft & Design.

Published by Protoangel 2013

ISBN 978-0-9568802-1-5