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by Charmian Saville The ceramic figures conjured out of Meri Wells's hands since 1999 exhibit a charge of unique beauty. Both appalling and funny, they form a mythical zoo, a crowd of faces that combine the spiritual, earthly, human, animal and amphibian. During my
first encounter with these creatures I was struck by their animation
and sense of movement, their intense theatricality. To guess at
the realm of reference and source material, to make comparisons
stimulated by the work, is to plunge into a vast imaginative emporium
echoing with the carvings in ancient churches which fuse animal
and human imagery, the works of Hieronymus Bosch, Lewis Carroll,
Christina Rossetti, C.S. Lewis, Heinrich Hoffman, Mervyn Peake,
Ted Hughes and Nigel Wells. There are others, of course, too numerous
to mention, but these rich shards and fragments of art are mixed,
literally and metaphorically, with nature, its colours and contours,
and the profound, sharp and searching intelligence of the artist.
This 'stuff of dreams' is melded with the effects of wild elemental
forces of wind, sea and rivers to create an unique form. Textures
are smooth and invite touch, like pebbles worn by waves and flood-water.
Colours might come from the ash of burnt gorse, bracken and bramble
or the earth taken from the land surrounding Caecarrog, a remote
cottage tucked into the breast of a hill, where Wells has lived
for the past thirty years. Three large ceramic torsos greet me as I set foot in Wells's workshop, their heads the size of a small child's. I fondle them, they fit the palm of the hand. The first has a human head, with a strong well-defined nose, (a regular feature on many of Wells's faces), the ears of a bear, and eyes that look up, questioning, listening, like a bird. The one arm looks strong, as if tucked into a pocket. Its body, slightly concave, with scrawled lines covering it, has a hunched shoulder and gives the impression of being blown by the wind in front and being buffeted from behind. Usually this motif is seen in the figures I call 'Mangled heads with horns'. The counter-tension of the head's upward gaze, the downward thrust of the arm, the hunched shoulder and concave torso contribute to an expressive vitality that encompasses humour, suspicion, curiosity, innocence and strength. Wells' ability to present both movement and contradiction in fired clay is surprising and impressive. The second
torso asserts this same flair for enticing the unexpected from
solid form: this 'Rainey Foxfriar', christened so because he recalls
for me the stone-carving in St. David's Cathedral in Pembrokeshire,
has marks all over his body like scorchmarks from a white-hot
poker; they are, to quote the poet Nigel Wells as 'black as a
burn'. The following words, from the same poem 'Rainey', both
describe the orangey-rust of the glaze underneath the scorchmarks
and the effect the figure has on me: "in his
flaming There is a
determined resistance in the posture, two arms thrust deep in
pockets, black sunglasses hiding his gaze; he is dark, sinister,
revengeful and ludicrous, a usurper of human things, who displays
many of the qualities of tragic character, he is a 21st century
Jacobean revenger fox. The third 'Messenger Rabbit' (who reminds
me, as do many of Wells's rabbit-eared creations, of Lewis Carroll's
creation in Through the Looking Glass) has the ubiquitous fine
human nose, prevalent in so many of what Wells calls her 'familiars',
whose mouth is on the verge of either mutating into a full, sensual
human orifice or reverting to a rabbit's. The markings on the
torso are a recent development: broad crosses one inside the other,
flanked by triangles. Like the scorchmarks on 'Rainey Foxfriar',
they resemble a bumt-on brand. The ears are strong, muscular and
phallic, the eyes express a sense of anxiety, of being rushed.
In the small gallery at Caecarrog, there is another full-sized
Messenger Rabbit standing about 45cm tall, with one arm, hand
in pocket, the thumb hooked over the edge. The feet are sinewy,
gripping claws merging with slippered human feet. The long tunic
is pond-slime green with a pink-grey cross covering the chest,
recalling Ted Hughes' poern Gog: "blood-crossed
Knight, the Holy Warrior, hooded with iron, the seraph of the
bleak edge." Three figures, with three cloven feet each, stand together, a microcosm of the mythological zoo created by Wells. 'Seahorse with wings', with a fin for a mane, has a gentle eye, swirls of black cover her curving body. Leaning back as if pulled by the tide or blown by the wind, she stands, shining. Next to this chimera is 'Crowned Skull', whose jaw juts forward, baring teeth. One wing is dropped close to the body, the other firmly flexed, adding to its aggressive positioning. The long rusty brown tunic with black swirls lies flat against the body as if the figure is standing in the wind. One of the 'Mangled heads with horns' stands next to these two, a more subdued, humble figure carrying a little chalice; a small thumb protrudes to support the hand holding the precious object. This defines him utterly, is his access to identity. Religious iconography is scattered throughout this collection, in echoes of bishop's mitres, crosses, black priest's clothes and a bible. Playing alongside this, suggestions of the dark side, of shadows. 'Birds', like those painted by Bosch, have beaks upturned, though their bodies contradict the possibility of flight; the onlooker smiles at the sense of the ridiculous evoked by strange hats on their heads. These creatures have to be seen to be believed. Wells has achieved a plasticity of motion and feeling in ceramic form that arouses wonder and imaginative challenge, "Submerged
in oceans, they grew gills and reproduced themselves, |
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"Meri
Wells - The Procession"
