Making Anxiety Solid

Kierkegaard in 'The Sickness unto Death' talks of the anxiety permeating existence. There was, in the early work of Jon Williams, a sense of such angst made palpable, but filtered through a cartoonist's vision of the world. Jon is an artist who makes a gentle darkness manifest. It is a world seemingly of alienation and of the alienated, portrayed through a veil of mixed-media satire. He takes emotion and makes it permanent through clay and firing.
The strange little groups of figures seem not to have a political intent, yet deal with an iconography of the underclass that feels highly subversive. Yet these pieces encapsulate a Sense of community - but a Society that is hard to access and hard to appreciate. Some of these disenfranchised youths were signed onto a Raku-firing workshop that Jon did. They greeted his initial presentation on his work with studied indifference and silence. As they engaged in the making processes of the workshop they slowly realised that they were making things and enjoying the activity and developing a pride in the product. But when it came to the firing of the clay he realised that they came with a more fully developed experience of pyromania than his own learning at university had provided: hopefully they left with a feeling of true achievement and an understanding that torching cars at the weekend does not really stand up as a ceramic experience.
As a student, he dealt with an abstracted and raw feeling about a malaise in society: now. Ten years later, the work seems a little more cheerful. He is making direct observation of the human condition and the frailties of individuals and the communities that fail to support and integrate them. He himself comes from a tight-knit community in Loughborough, to which he has returned. His own sense of personal stability contributes something positive to these memorials to shattered, insubstantial lives. He documents histories, taking relics from his own past and transforming these ephemera to permanence: the histories are quite malleable and universal, as is the medium and language of clay: in a transformation of the early creation myths, it is almost as if he is giving divine form to shattered lives through clay.
 

David Jones
 

David Jones is a practising potter. He is also a critic and the author of two books examining the relationship between ideas and ceramics:
Raku - Investigations into Fire (Crowood Press 1999) Firing - Philosophies within contemporary ceramic practice. (Crowood Press 2007).
www.davidjonesceramics.co.uk