David Whiting - The Williamson Art Gallery

Emma Rodgers is now recognised as one of Britain’s leading ceramic sculptors.
She has a particularly probing insight into both the action and tenderness of the
animal world. It is a subject she invests not with tamed sentimentality (as is
often the case) or saccharine blandness, but with its full power and life force.
Her wild hares, bulls and ravens, her human dancers, are often expressed –
in bronze as well as clay – in a heightened sense of movement or tension,
absorbed in the trials and dramas of existence. But this major exhibition at the
Williamson Art Gallery, surveying her work over the last ten years,
demonstrates just how varied her approach to the subject has been. It shows
that, as her art has developed, she has actually been paring away, approaching
her themes in an increasingly abstract and economic way. It gets directly to
their heart, their essence. Rodgers’ work is as much about internal space as
mass, conveyed in freely
modelled and animated surfaces, so stretched and torn that large ruptures open
up their dark interiors. Suddenly, more ‘finished’ academic renderings of the
body look literal and obvious. Rodgers
aims to get beneath the skin, her knowledge of structure, of bone and tissue,
enabling her to see and explore the inner spirit and physicality of the animal.
The drawings on display and the partial reconstruction of her studio space give
valuable insights into the process. Her sketches are immediate, capturing a
movement or gesture, as much about the motion of the animal as its form. Her
ideas are derived not only from creatures observed on her extensive travels,
but her own dissections and the sort of images pinned on her studio wall - of
various fauna in their habitats, of their skeletal structures, and of dancers in
rehearsal. Her source material reveals an artist not only concerned with beasts
in the wild, but those compromised by subjugation to human needs and
entertainment – perhaps most explicitly seen here in a sculpture of monkeys on
roller skates, an uncomfortable reminder of our intrusions into their world.
Rodgers’ ability to depict combative energy is formidable. Here there are
leaping and boxing hares – occupying the floor or transversing walls – rearing
horses, galloping bulls and roaming monkeys. All are rendered in a combination
of clays and glazes (as well as found objects) that gives her cast of characters
remarkable animation and charge. Her surfaces become landscapes; they have
a terrain. But Rodgers is also an artist of stillness and calm; a baboon
sensitively cradles her young - an emotional contact expressed through gesture
and eye contact. A raven quietly surveys the room like a sentinel and a brake
of dead pheasants is seemingly desiccated by time. The whole rich cycle of life
is here in this memorable show – from infancy to death – where even in those
subjects bursting with life, you can see the bone beneath the muscle, the
mortality that stalks us everyday.

David Whiting