Lubna Chowdhary works in a shed at the end of her back garden. Designed by the architect David Adjaye in 2003, the structure is a wood-lined black box with cleverly chamfered corners and floor-to-ceiling windows. Anchored by a kiln, the shed is a place of industry and warmth. On the morning of our meeting it is arranged for a visit by a museum group later in the day, so offers a bite-sized retrospective. On a counter to the left of the door is a selection of pieces from ‘Metropolis’, a set of more than 1000 hand-sized ceramic objects that Lubna began in 1991 and added to over many years. The shelves opposite the door hold groups of tiles, both handmade and custom-cut industrial, arranged to create the intriguing ceramic phrases that are the product of her recent residency at the Victoria and Albert Museum. In front of the large window is a table filled with about two dozen white-glazed structures. Each about 25 centimetres high, they have intricately decorated surfaces that remind me of dovecotes from Greece and the Middle East.
Falling into conversation about these works, Lubna tells me, “I was really interested in the idea of objects having a potency, and questioning what it is that makes that happen.”
Among her inspirations in this case were the houses of Burkina Faso, which she describes as “powerful because of their almost insane obsessive all-covering ornament.” The starting point of this group of objects were simple sheets of clay entirely imprinted with pattern. “I put ornament at the heart of making, and producing these sheets allowed me to focus on form and produce an intuitive and sometimes accidental combination of form and surface.” Among Lubna’s primary concerns is the relationship between East and West, an area where her questions about her own identity merge with her interest in culture and its expression in form. Ornament proves the wild card in this territory, an element that can cross cultures with relative ease and is able to subvert every rule thought up for its governance.
Turning to a set of images she describes as her “visual cues”, Lubna shows me examples of objects made at the intersection of Indian and European cultures, many of which combine heavy European form with dense Indian decoration. “When Europeans arrived they came with their own culture of furniture and a new set of ergonomics that were unfamiliar to the Indian craftsmen they commissioned”. Within the objects, there is a complete merging of aesthetic and cultural understanding or lack of understanding. When I first saw these hybrid objects - there are quite a few of them in the V&A’s collection - I recognised my own botched-together aesthetic and formal language in them. I relished their awkwardness.” “Botched together” is, of course, an absurd way to describe Lubna’s facility for fusing forms of diverse origins.
We return to the theme of the conjunction of disparate cultures many times in our morning’s conversation. Alongside we touch on other oppositions, such as the industrial and the handmade, two- versus three-dimen- sions and the culture of ceramics in the context of the wider world. But we start with the potently personal. We are talking about a set of tiny figures given to Lubna by the artist Eduardo Paolozzi, who was her tutor at the Royal College of Art. They are representations of various Asian, African and Middle Eastern characters that were made to be used in architectural models of the railways, and, as such were at the core of the colonial project. From discussing Paolozzi’s take on these objects, we soon dive deep into Lubna’s own history.
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“Paolozzi wasn’t particularly widely travelled, but he was very curious about non-European cultures and anthropology. It is difficult to get to the bottom of why he was so interested. I think the reason we connected, was that we both had to negotiate our identities. We were both from immigrant families and our ancestors had worked on the land. His family had come to Britain and set up an ice cream shop in Edinburgh, mine had worked professionally in Tanzania, but ended up selling clothing in Manchester - both of us had worked in our families’ businesses. Being Italian, during the war, he would really have experienced at first hand that sense of being other, being singled out and ostracised because of who he was. By the time I met him, he had a refined accent. He’d been to the Slade and I imagine he’d reinvented himself. I feel that I have lost my accent too. It was difficult enough being Asian, then having a Northern accent on top of it, the whole class thing as well, it was a lot to juggle. I used to have a strong Manchester accent, but because English wasn’t my mother tongue, I could drop it quite easily.
What is your first language?
Punjabi, but, growing up in Tanzania, we all spoke very correct English. When I arrived in Rochdale aged five, I didn’t understand the accent - what anyone was saying. I took an apple to school on my first day and I remember a boy in the playground saying ‘bring uz some grub n’ I’ll stick up fer yer” and I thought ‘what on earth is he talking about?’ Later I worked out he wanted me to bring him an apple too.
Did you talk to Paolozzi about identity issues explicitly?
No, lots went unsaid, we didn’t delve into his identity. He interviewed me for the RCA, and there were all sorts of questions ... I remember the Head of Ceramics, saying, ‘if we offer you the place, how can you convince us that you won’t just go off and get married?’, it was quite shocking, but the funny thing was I was able to say ‘well, I have already had an arranged marriage, so it’s fine’. He was a bit dumbfounded. I was quite direct.
You had already had an arranged marriage?!
My parents had arranged a marriage for me when I was 16. It was all quite unspoken, but they felt it was a suitable match. I just accepted it. Then, in 6th form, I started going to a lunchtime art club and the teacher was very encouraging. She told me I should apply for an art foundation course, but immediately I thought ‘I can’t do that’, it just seemed outside our family’s experience. In the end, I applied secretly and got a place at the local college. Eventually, I told my parents, and they agreed that I could go. I had a clear year before I was due to get married, so they said, ‘ok, do the course and then get married after that.’ But of course, that was the year that changed my life - conversely, my parents think of it as the year that they lost me.
Still?!
I think in the back of their minds they must feel that their lives would have been much simpler if their daughters had married, had children and stayed put. Moving into a new and often hostile culture was a difficult adjustment, and they’d had to struggle to make it.
What happened after your foundation?
All my friends began applying to university and I wanted to apply too. My tutors encouraged me, advising me to apply in the area I was going to be living in after my marriage. I applied to Hull and was accepted to study fine art. We had to agree it with my future husband’s family as I was to live with them. I wasn't married for long before I realised how restricted my future life would be and I made the decision to leave. I kept a low profile. I had to completely divorce myself from my community to be able to develop creatively; not just to develop creatively, but to develop as myself. It was a very difficult time for everyone and had huge repercussions for the whole family. At the time my sister and I were the only two girls - the only people - in our community, who had applied or gone to university.
How did you get to university from there?
I didn’t apply again until three years later, by which time I was in touch with my parents again. Social security had allowed me to survive, to apply for help with rent after leaving my marriage and also to get a student grant. I worked on a Community Enterprise Scheme and I’d started a pottery night class.
I eventually applied to do the Wood, Metal and Ceramics degree at Manchester as I felt that having some practical skills would give me security. After my degree, the most practical option was to apply to a teacher training course - at that time the government were offering scholarships to people studying for a teaching certificate in Craft, Design and Technology, but suddenly a residency opportunity came up at a girls’ private school in Ascot so I weighed it up. I knew my parents really wanted me to do the teaching, and the course I applied to in Leeds were so excited to be training their first Asian Craft, Design and Technology teacher, but I just wasn’t ready to go back into the community fold. I wanted to keep moving and exploring, so I went to Ascot.
What was your work like at the time?
During my time in Manchester I became interested in anthropological collections. We travelled to Amster-Dam on a study trip where I visited the Tropen Museum, it was a completely new and inspiring experience. I later visited London and saw the Museum of Mankind and also the Pitt Rivers in Oxford. Growing up in England at that time, non-European cultures were never referenced, not in literature nor art, or anything really. I’d had a completely Eurocentric education and the visits to these museums were the first time I had seen non-European cultures represented in a museum setting, it was so exciting and stimulating to find these rich and powerful objects in collections I could identify with. Of course there were problems in the way that the museums represented these cultures, but I began absorbing everything I saw and it had a huge influence on my work. I started making totemic objects, things on legs, lots of things running and moving, almost reliving what I had been doing over the past few years. I worked mostly with clay, smoke firing, reds and blacks, unglazed, quite heavily referencing non-Western iconography and images. It was an outpouring, I worked hard, I couldn't stop working and became addicted to just being in the studio making objects. I came out with a 1st from Manchester, but I hadn’t really been asked to articulate what I was doing.
Ascot must have come as a bit of a shock!
I’d never really come across the sorts of people at the school before and I really felt my class there, the whole race and class thing was thrown into sharp focus. I wasn’t comfortable there, so within the first few months I began to plan my escape and I decided to apply for an MA. During the last year of my degree I’d visited London and seen the RCA degree shows. I was also interested in textiles, so I applied to Manchester to do textiles and the RCA for ceramics. I was offered a place at both and chose the RCA.
What year was that?
I was there ‘89 to ‘91. I met Paolozzi at my interview and later I heard that he’d thought I wasn’t ready to do the course, but they took me on anyway.
But you must have experienced a lot more than most of your fellow students. You certainly had to do a lot more to get there.
I’d had experience in living life, but I think I was a bit naive about my work and its place in the world. When I applied to the RCA, I wasn’t able to understand and articulate what I was doing. Even when I left I still didn’t fully acknowledge that I was trying to negotiate my cultural identity through the work: ‘why am I making things that look like they’re pre-modern, when actually I am embedded in the modern world?’ The prevailing interest in the department at the RCA seemed to be in Danish minimal ceramics. My work felt quite out of place.
How did you get through?
Paolozzi was the one person I connected with. He only ever dipped in and out, but he took me under his wing and made it feel ok to just be making what I was making. In Manchester I had developed a habit of visiting flea markets and collecting randomly, gathering small objects in cabinets. When I came across Paolozzi’s Krazy Kat archive, it sent my collecting in a different direction. He made me think more about objects that were, industrial and contemporary and my Sunday mornings were spent at Brick Lane. But obviously there is only so much you can collect as a student because you don’t have the space to store anything. The way I gathered objects really influenced what I was making at the time. That was when I began ‘Metropolis’.
And apart from Paolozzi?
The tutors and I didn't easily understand each other. My work seemed outside their fields of reference and I think they found it aesthetically difficult. There hadn’t been many students who had a foot in two cultures before, and our conversations were often stilted because they required a different kind of curiosity. I threw myself into the world of design which was new to me. I was very influenced by Victor Papaneks 'Design for the Real World’ and Buckminster Fuller’s utopian visions of the future. I was excited about being in the city and all that was around me and I also travelled to Paris and Berlin. It was the first time I had been exposed to this world and I started attending as many design lectures as I could. In the ceramics department it was slightly frowned on as they were noticing my absence and also that I wasn’t really making anything. I was just absorbing information but eventually, I ran into problems because I hadn’t resolved what I was doing in the studio. I started to think about possibly making furniture and made small clay maquettes, that came from ideas I’d become interested in during the design lectures. I found I could make lots of these maquettes quite quickly.
Is that a particular virtue of ceramics?
There is a very direct relationship between your mind and what comes from your hands when working with clay. Working quickly meant that I didn’t think too much about calibrating two competing sets of aesthetics and languages. I made the small objects very intuitively, and somehow in the process combined my earlier interest in ethnographic artefacts, with the language of modern product and architecture that was new to me. The two languages were coming together in making the objects and I found the results quite interesting.
I had a tutorial with Paolozzi soon after and these things were sitting on my desk. I was at quite a low ebb and I hadn’t really given them much importance, because to me they were just maquettes for something bigger, but Paolozzi kept pointing at them, saying, ‘there’s a lot in here, you know?’ I resisted because, at the time, most people in the department were making large plinth-based objects and I felt that was what I ought to be doing too, but when I tried increasing the scale of the work it had a real awkwardness to it. I kept returning to the small things. When I had forty or so, I could see that they had a collective power.
I’d work in batches creating numerous parts, which I eventually joined, inventing new objects in a modular way. I would also make existing objects one at a time and there was a translation in the process which resulted in something just familiar.
There is a bit of Memphis going on in a lot of them.
Yes, I was drawn to the Memphis language, but I hadn’t realised the Indian connection with Sottsass at the time - that he had travelled many times to India, and how hugely influenced he’d been by it.
Memphis was quite an unfashionable influence back then, as I remember.
Yes, it was becoming unfashionable, it was waning.
Oh look, that’s an Apple computer. I remember that coloured plastic model being launched in the 90s – ’97? ’98?
Yes, I got mine in the late 90’s, it must have been about then. I had bought a set of postcards of design icons around that time, everything from the Coca Cola bottle to the Zippo lighter, the Olivetti typewriter, and the Ericofon telephone, and I began making them in clay. There was a translation in the process that resulted in something on the edge of familiar.
It’s interesting that some of the objects you were referencing must have been contemporary when you made the pieces, but now seem quite dated.
Initially, I was making historic design objects and then I began to make current ones, and those are the ones that look dated very quickly, especially the electronic gadgets. The mobile phone, for example: the first one I made looks like a clay brick now. I would keep remaking new models as they came out, but eventually I just couldn’t keep up.
Does the scale of these pieces relate to the hand?
They’re small because, when I‘m using only my hands and a small set of tools, it’s an immediate process, there is a close connection between thinking and making. Whereas, if I think ‘I am going to make this three-foot high’, I would have to make a mould or wait for things to slowly dry, and something would be lost during the process. With these pieces, I was working in a loosely modular way. I didn’t have the technical knowledge or the sophistication that a lot of students in the design departments had, but I wanted to reference the modern world and its technology and feel part of it, so I found objects that were vacuum-formed or injection moulded, industrially produced things like small toys or packaging with interesting shapes, and I would make small-scale moulds from them. Over time I made a sort of ‘vocabulary of moulds’ that allowed me to create clean precise forms, rather than hand-modelling everything. From these, I press moulded clay and then made new forms by dissecting and juxtaposing and joining them, almost like Lego. It's possible to be very playful when working at such a small scale, but, as soon as you increase the size, the clay becomes unwieldy. I remember someone suggesting that a small object like this is quite easy to post through someone’s intellectual letter box but that wasn’t my reasoning for making them small. I had so many disparate ideas and thoughts, I wanted to process them all rapidly.
You mentioned that you visited India during your time at the RCA.
Yes, between the first and second years of my MA I went to India on the Paolozzi scholarship. The plan was to look at southern temple architecture, but in the process I also readjusted my preconceptions about India. I spent six weeks there, flying to Bombay and travelling across to Mysore, Tamil Nadu and then Kerala, making stops at temple sites along the way. When I visit India or Pakistan it brings the question of who I am to the forefront. It’s very subtly challenging because you realise that you are not Indian or Pakistani any more than you are English. It’s quite an unsettling feeling.
How did it influence your work?
I realised that this experience was important, something that was a part of me, something that I had to make use of. I began making some large sculptures that were architectural and technological in their forms, but with primitive-looking surfaces. By making larger objects I suppose I was conforming to the conventions of ceramics, but alongside I continued with the smaller pieces. I remember, during my final presentation, there being very little conversation about the work. I think it was difficult for people to understand, to engage and ask the right questions. I was trying to bring together my experience of being between two cultures, but it was not going to be a smooth resolution and I hadn’t come across anyone of a similar experience, that I could discuss theses things with.
When did you start making tiles?
I had been out of the RCA for a few years, I was exhibiting work, but mostly teaching and conducting workshops. I was using teaching to support my work, and it was allowing me to follow my interests. But one year my teaching work dried up and I was left without much to live on. I thought, ‘ok I have these skills and I need to make a living from them. How can I apply them to something more practical?’ I had always been interested in the relationship between ornament and architecture, and was aware of the long history of tile in architecture, not only in Western architecture but also in Middle Eastern and Eastern cultures, so it felt like an obvious area to develop.
At the same time, I was beginning to tire of the narrowness of my audience in the craft world. I felt that working with tiles on architectural projects and applying them to the built environment would open up the work to a wider section of society. People could experience the work in an incidental or unplanned way without visiting a gallery.
Tell me about your use of colour in the tiles.
The tiles have allowed me to be more expansive with colour, and much more exploratory than I was previously. If you glaze a three-dimensional ceramic object the glaze moves in the firing, flowing downwards, so it’s very difficult to control. But if you are working with a flat surface such as tile, you can lay the glaze onto it in quite a graphic way, juxtaposing colours in a crisp way. In general, ceramicists have a narrow palette of glazes that they work with for years, often not venturing far from it. There is often a snobbishness about mixing your own glazes rather than buying industrial ones. When I started working with industrial glaze I felt slightly guilty, but it allowed me to work with a huge variety of glazes that I blended and that eventually became my trademark.
I think I have a good ability to hold colour in my mind. When using glaze you’re working blind, because the colour only develops in the firing. Some of the things I glaze are often happy accidents. Tiles allow you to endlessly arrange and rearrange, until you have the right balance. I am not so interested in harmonious colour, I always like to have something that throws it off, or is a bit of a surprise, and that’s quite easy to achieve with modular tiles as its possible to create interesting juxtapositions of colour. I really enjoy the flexibility of working with tiles, being able to keep everything open and fluid until the last minute. For every project, I would make almost twice the amount of work that I needed, to have enough to play with, then edit, select and compose right up until the end.
What is the link between the tile pieces and the three-dimensional work?
Initially, I worked with modular tiles and this allowed me to develop projects of various scales and applications. It was only later, after completing quite a few projects, that I started to think about bridging the gap between the flat work and the sculptural pieces. I’ve always felt they come from the same root, that their points of reference are the same, even if their eventual contexts are very different. But over time I felt the work had become compartmentalised. I had two different audiences for the work and people wouldn’t necessarily connect the tile work with the sculptural work. There was a split in the work and I wanted to consolidate it.
Are you planning to bring them together now?
That was one of the aims of my residency at the V&A. It wasn’t just about bringing together two sets of cultural references and aesthetics, but also about making a physical, formal and conceptual connection between the tile-based and the sculptural work. I love working with tile, it’s allowed me to explore industrial processes and materials and to take on wide-ranging commissions - it’s particularly satisfying to make work for public spaces, which always feels very democratic – but I was feeling a real hunger to make self-initiated work again. It was one of the reasons I applied to the V&A.
What had reawakened your appetite for objects?
A combination of things. I was artist in residence at Camden Arts Centre in 1994, and recently (2015-2016) they asked me to make a couple of new editions for them. They particularly wanted sculptural pieces. I’d already started developing ideas and this was the opportunity to begin making sculpture again after a long break.
Soon after this, the Whitechapel Gallery asked me to make an edition for the Paolozzi show (2017). At the time I was exploring the potential of water-jet cutting tile to create flat abstract shapes. I made a two-dimensional object for them called ‘Softswitch', which refers to a software technology.
There was a fluidity developing between the thinking and processing of ideas and these two commissions gave me the freedom to push this further. They were the first opportunity to present work in which the ideas, materials and processes of both types of work were amalgamated and the results were very well received.
When you gather pieces together on a shelf, do you see them as one piece, like a phrase made of objects?
Yes, I see the tableaux as collective pieces, but the individual objects sometimes originate from different places, times and ideas. I make numerous objects over time and then select, juxtapose and compose groups from them.
So you are thinking of what you made at the V&A as a fixed piece?
Yes, I see the whole V&A piece (Serial Structures) as one work rather than individual shelves. My starting point was the idea of the museum and its displays. It’s a similar strategy and iconography to ‘Metropolis’, but in two dimensions. I’ve always been interested in the idea of horror vacui (fear of empty space), which is mostly thought of as a non-western tendency, and I wanted to make a work that completely filled an area. The supporting structure needed to be versatile - rather than the objects having fixed positions, I needed to place things and then move them around as I made more and more, eventually filling the space. It's also about juxtaposing the industrial with the handmade, making connections between them. It was the first time I’d introduced handmade objects into the tableau pieces and I liked contrast, the way the industrial and the handmade play off each other. I was also thinking about the materials and processes in a loaded way, about their transformation, their value and their cultural location. In a way it’s quite a clumsy first step, simply placing things together. I want to expand on that, combining and merging materials, processes and languages fluidly, both within and between objects. Creating hybrids: that’s what was really driving my thinking.
At the same time, I’ve become slightly obsessed with the idea of ornament. My early relationship with ornament was that ‘more is more’ but through the process of my art school education, I became conditioned to believe that ‘less is more’. I came across the essay by Adolf Loos ‘Ornament and Crime’ in which he describes ornament as degenerate and the sign of an uncultured society. I remembered Villa Muller from lectures at the RCA - at the time it had a big influence on me
In opposition to Loos’ essay, I remade his house in clay, but completely covered it in ornament. It’s the first thing I have done of this kind, but it feels like it could be a project: taking modernist architectural icons and recreating them in a series. The V&A is the ideal place to think about this. You are surrounded by ornament, in the architecture of the place and in its collections.
Do you feel at home working in the Museum?
It’s interesting having some distance from it. As a student at the RCA, I’d avoided the V&A, I was very aware of its colonial past. It projected a view of the world I wasn’t so interested in then and the South Asian and Islamic collections seemed trapped in a vacuum. Now, I can use the Museum for my own purposes, I have a more eclectic approach to it, seeing it as an incredible resource to draw upon and if necessary, bypassing ideas about identity and ownership.
I met some tremendously supportive people at the V&A, but it can also seem a very narrow world that doesn’t always engage with outsiders. I had a conversation with a curator who said, ‘You just have to keep kicking at these doors’, but I thought, ‘Well, you are the gatekeeper of these doors!’ I don't really want to have to be kicking. I suppose it’s a continuation of what I felt at the RCA and afterwards in the prevailing ceramics scene: that, when you’re an anomaly, people don’t have the points of reference to engage with you or your work. The position of ceramics in the art world has shifted during my career and it now has to engage with the wider cultural debates about class, culture and race which just haven’t occurred in British ceramics.
During the residency, I was able to explore the museum's collections to re-examine past work and make connections with the new work. It was an extremely productive time, providing a valuable opportunity to consolidate and develop ideas.
Being positioned in the museum for six months compels you to think about both your own place and the place of your work in the narrative that the museum has constructed.
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Lubna and I wind up the morning talking about the opportunities that have come her way since the V&A residency. She is now represented by the Mumbai-based fine art gallery Jhaveri Contemporary, and ‘Metropolis’ will be shown at the Kochi Biennale late in 2018. She is increasingly in the position of directing her own lines of enquiry and activity, rather than working to commission. Her project of merging two- and three-dimensions within single pieces is ongoing, and questions relating to ornament vs restraint continue to occupy her mind and her hands. Later, reading the transcript of our exchange, Lubna hesitates over the emphasis on the personal, but on reflection she allows it to stand. “I think it’s important to acknowledge that not everyone has an easy route into the art world, and that some have many more hurdles to overcome,” she writes in an email, “The V&A was a very important step for me, but it made me realise that these hurdles still exist. In all the years that I’ve been working, they are still there.”
