Notes

Lucinda Mudge has an intimate relationship with failure. As a ceramicist, her chosen medium is fragile by nature, and prone to fracture. Sudden changes in temperature in her kiln can cause her large-scale vases to crack, crumble, or collapse, rendering months of hard work futile. In Mudge’s love affair with ceramics, this crazing of clay is akin to heartbreak. It can start slowly – small crack appearing and spreading, familiar patterns disintegrating, once bright hues fading into oblivion – or it can all fall apart without warning. “It’s a brutal choice of material,” says the artist, and, like love, it can bring both great joy and great misery. 

Love Story, Mudge’s exhibition with Everard Read, comprised a series of large-scale ceramic vases that cast a smizing side-eye on star-crossed relationships. Mudge toys with ideas of disappointment and degeneration using her distinctive wit and wordplay. Her vivid vessels bear familiar floral art deco motifs and flourishes of gilt filigree, some twisting around the artist’s characteristic speech bubbles, which contain quotes from a variety of popular media. If they could speak, they’d be provocative, glib, jaded. ‘Hello Pretty Girl’ says a tall, slender-necked vessel. ‘Seriously?’ sneers an urn with two handles like burning ears. Like the stories of most romances-gone-wrong, there’s a ‘Bad Bad Boy’ (why can’t we stop falling for them?) and a self- satisfied ‘I Told You So’ (at least we’ve still got our dignity). From the first sparks flying to white-hot passion to the embers finally flickering and going out, Mudge’s vases take us on this journey, their bright patterns gradually fading and losing colour from rim to base.

The proceeds from the sale of this lot will benefit three young South African classical musicians awarded scholarships by UK music schools, and supported by the Quartet of Peace Trust and the ARCO Project at the Royal Birmingham Conservatoire.

The Quartet of Peace Trust was founded to support musically talented young people from South Africa, promoting reconciliation, mutual respect and tolerance through music. The Trust has partnered with the ARCO Project to extend musical access and development in South Africa.

Three South African teenagers have won scholarships to prestigious musical institutions in the UK: long-standing ARCO students Sifiso Mbatha, 17, from Dobsonville, Soweto, who will study cello at the Purcell School in Hertfordshire, and Kamogelo Maraba, 18, from Diepkloof, Soweto, who will study cello at the Royal Birmingham Conservatoire. Jordan Brooks, 17, from Cape Town, will study violin at Chetham’s School of Music, Manchester.

However, these awards do not cover travel and living costs. The proceeds from the sale of this lot will help these musicians to take up the opportunity that they have worked so hard to create.

“We were made to enjoy music .... Human beings are actually created for the transcendent, for the sublime, for the beautiful, for the truthful ... and all of us are given the task of trying to make this world a little more hospitable to these beautiful things.”  Archbishop Desmond Tutu, Patron, Quartet of Peace

Exhibited

Everard Read, Cape Town, Lucinda Mudge: Love Story, November 2019.