Can you start by introducing yourself and sharing an overview of your artistic practice?
My name is Charlie Duck and I am an artist working with painting, drawing, printmaking and ceramics. With each material and process I use, the tension between control and chance is key. I learn through experimentation and am driven by a fascination in the unexpected and unfamiliar. In my work I am always trying to surprise myself, I feel restless and enjoy moving between different ways of working.
I live and work in Cornwall, and alongside my practice I work as a Senior Lecturer at Falmouth University, teaching on BA Drawing and MA Fine Art.
What led you to explore ceramics? Was there a specific moment or inspiration that sparked your interest in working with clay?
In 2015 I was invited to do a “non-vessel” ceramics residency at Troy Town Art Pottery at Open School East. The residency invited applications from artists who had no previous experience of working with clay and I was interested in how I could use the opportunity to explore how my paintings might shift through a process of translation from 2D to 3D.
I spent a week making and then once the work had been fired I spent a week glazing. That was the first time I worked with clay.
How central is narrative to your practice, and how does it shape your work?
My work purposefully eschews any idea of fixed narrative. Whilst the work alludes to things, with individual works feeling part of a larger system, for me it is important that the works remain open to interpretation. I don’t want to make didactic work, instead I am interested in the associations viewers bring to the work(s) and the meanings that they might find in them. I use certain forms and motifs for a range of different reasons, sometimes something might resonate with me on a very personal level whilst other times my interest in it might be purely formal. There is, I hope, enough room in the work for multiple positions to exist simultaneously. I like that things can collide.
Did you receive formal training in ceramics, or did you develop your skills independently?
Other than a clay robin that I made at primary school around the age of five or six I didn’t work with clay until the TTAP residency mentioned above. After the residency I would only work with clay when it presented itself, for instance I was invited to spend two months on a residency in Tuscany and whilst there I found an old kiln in a workshop that I was able to use. It was very remote and I wasn’t able to get to a shop so I dug up clay in the grounds of the villa and made a series of small paintings with that clay. I have always just learned through making and experimenting, not just with clay but in general really, but I think clay really supports that way of thinking and making.
In 2020 I was awarded the Acme Fire Station five-year live work award. After years of impermanent studios across London I knew I had a secure studio for five years so the first thing I did when I moved in was to buy my own kiln; since then I have worked increasingly with clay, to the point that for the last four or five years it has become the mainstay of my practice. I like using it as a way of thinking about painting.
I am interested in glaze and its relationship with the history of painting in terms of surface, texture and gesture, much more so than anything else really. After years making hundreds of high and mid fire glazes I have spent the last year almost exclusively working with low-fire glazes that I have made. With low firing the margins for error are so small and the results are so rarely worth hanging on to that it’s been a bit of a test. I studied Painting at the Städelschule under Amy Sillman and Monika Baer. Amy Sillman has a great essay called On Colour, where she writes emphatically about the potential of paint and what it can allow but also how unwieldy and heartbreakingly brutal it can be – it perfectly describes my relationship with glazing, especially the last year.
In what ways do your two-dimensional works, like drawings, influence your three-dimensional creations, and vice versa?
Almost all of my clay works are made in response to drawings, though in turn those drawings often are responding to something or other in the clay work. It’s hard to distinguish what influences what in the studio really; I sit with things for a long time and there are forms of motifs that I have been very interested in for a long time which sometimes bubble to the surface briefly only to disappear for a long while again.
What I like about clay is how it forces you to work at its rhythm, there’s lots of time to think about things as the clay becomes more and more workable. It took me a while to learn that and understand when to do things and when to wait.
Where do you typically find inspiration for your art? Are there particular themes or sources that resonate with you?
Everywhere… there aren’t necessarily specific themes or sources. When I read Deleuze and Guattari’s writing on the rhizome it helped make sense of my work; for a long time before that I was trying to figure how my work could speak to specific things and the more I made the less I felt I was able to do that. Intertextuality is central to the work, as it is to my thinking in general. I like how things collide; it makes sense of the way I seem to experience life. I tend to read quite eclectically, so lots of those different things feed into the work, but often obliquely or indirectly. Other interests that I’ve had since I was a teenager are also there, but again obliquely. I think one of the best things about being an artist is how it can allow for this wild synthesis of things into something new.
Can you walk us through your creative process, from concept to completion?
I spend a lot of my time in the studio drawing and painting. I often work quickly and in an iterative manner. Through this approach I have developed a repository of images from which to pull from. Things mostly happen without realising, I find it is typically after I have made work and have some distance from it that I begin to understand what the important things in it are.
I really enjoy exhibition making as it allows you to begin the process of editing and refining, identifying what is happening in the work and what the constants are. It’s not always smooth sailing but I’ve learned to trust in the process.
Where do you create your work? Could you share a bit about your studio or workspace?
I have a studio at CAST, in Helston, Cornwall. I have worked here since February 2023. It is quite small, and very full of things but it is warm and I have built in it a mezzanine to hide all the things I don’t want to look at anymore.
How would you describe the pieces you’ll be exhibiting at County Hall Pottery Gallery? What do you hope viewers take away from them??
I am exhibiting three large format paintings. It is accidental, but one was made in 2022, one in 2023 and one in 2024. I’m also showing some single panel paintings that were made between 2020 – 2023.
My intention is that the work is generous and I purposefully want for the work to be open to interpretation, so if viewers feel something of that in the work I’ll be happy.
Do you have preferred techniques or materials you work with in ceramics? What draws you to these approaches?
I work simply, typically making clay versions of drawings, paintings or prints that are usually make in series. The clay pieces are not facsimiles, and instead are interpretations or responses to the original drawing, painting or print. I will sometimes make 3D dioramas, and other times make wall-based multi panel paintings.
My interest in ceramics is in how the discipline can allow me to explore notions of expanded painting. I make all of my glazes from scratch and fire across a range of temperatures to explore the possibilities of different materials. There are no stains or synthetic dyes in the surfaces, everything is raw material combined with water. I am interested in the agency of these materials and the agency of the kiln, and how this combined with what I know combine to make outcomes that I can and can’t control.
What are you currently working on? Are there any upcoming projects or exhibitions we should look forward to?
Things are ticking along in the studio. I am having a two person show with the painter Christopher Green at Hweg in Penzance in the spring and am currently also working towards a solo show of new work in Lyon.