fian andrews

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Above one of Fian's new works from the Nude Pot range

Fian Andrews starting point is a challenge to the twenty year supremacy of abstraction in ceramics, questioning assumptions about the avant-garde and re-engaging with previously derided notions of narrative and colour. His work is indeed about narrative, about people and about relationships. The central theme is how we view and interact with the world around us. Essentially, his pots are portraits, each with their own personality which is forged during firing. Once they emerge from the kiln, he relinquishes ownership. he is just another viewer. Thus the narrative he may have originally intended to convey is no longer important. It is the viewer's new relationship with the object and the narrative generated by that relationship which is important. Such a dialogue between viewer and object informs all of his creative output.

Ceramics are a fascinating medium with which to engage in narrative. It is perhaps closer to film than paint, in that the three dimensionality of the vessel suggests a temporal engagement with the work. The viewer can never see all of the "story" at once, so they are forced to retain what they have seen, naturally reinventing it in their mind's eye. This is then influenced by what comes next and is intensified by the curvature of the surface as the viewer moves round the vessel, making the image bend and foreshorten.

With this new body of work it was important for him to create something tactile and energetic. He wanted to harness the qualities of the materials: the clay, the glaze and the slips. There is another layer of narrative contained within the marks, a story about his own interaction with the object and its environment. Fian Andrews loves the fact that the first thing people do when they walk into a gallery showing his work is to touch it. The dimension of the work is also significant. Fina has always used scale to indicate a change of context in the work. On a small domestic pot there is an intimacy between object and viewer which is reinforced by the ubiquity of domestic ceramics: He uses this familiarity to transport the viewer from the domestic to the universal.