Luke Fuller

Luke Fuller’s much acclaimed arrival on the English ceramic scene should be seen for what it is, a widespread recognition of his importance initially founded on an exceptional academic trajectory packed with honours and prizes and then developed through remarkable capacity for work, backed up by a rare level of inventivity when solving the technical demands of his own artistic ambitions.

As witness to his talents, he has developed a unique construction strategy based on the integration of corrugated cardboard subframes, specific to each sculpture, on which he has freedom to explore clay forms which, without this essential support, would never be able to stand.

The invention of these ephemeral structures, condemned to be consumed in the first firing, turns out to be the indispensable innovation that then allowed the artist to pass on to his second: – inflicting on his sculptures, whilst still supported by their internal scaffolding, a forceful reshaping. Whether by being struck with hammers, or carved or cut, or being submitted to an array of other forceful means, they end up as pieces that recount in detail all the difficulty of their own birth.

Those who have already written about the artist begin, in an effort to situate his work, by emphasizing the emotional link, which he himself talks about, between his ceramic projects and his intimate esteem for the landscapes of his childhood, the wasteland left by the steel industry around Port Talbot in southern Wales. It is a landscape forged by working men, geologically altered by the accumulation of industrial waste, bordered to the south by the sea and to the north by mountains. It stands, for the artist, as a land of inspiring memories and it seems certain that its special mineral-packed qualities were a vital source-material at the very beginning of his creative adventure. He needed to pay tribute to all the singularity of what he considered his family heritage.

As you will see, this need to not forget his own origins is still an important element in his artistic motivation, but it has taken its proper place among the many other considerations that now animate his spirit and assure the flow of his constantly renewed inventiveness.