Outline of a talk by Nicholas Rena at a symposium hosted by The University of Westminster

For those of us making a certain type of vessel, one of the central metaphors in such work, which is perhaps to obvious to state, is that the vessels are empty.  It is a powerful metaphor - to produce a body of work about containment which is intended to remain resolutely empty.
 
[Ritual Vessel]
Such works are empty because they refer to traditions of use that are almost lost: ceremonies or rituals, involving vessels, which were performed in common and often in public, such as baptism, anointment, invocation, blessing...where man and the material world fused.

But perhaps these empty objects do have some function.  In a world dematerialising into an anti-physical one of text and image, of speed and noise, these objects sit - heavy, thick and still.  Material trying to be as palpable as it can, reproaching a world going virtual.

Influences
Firstly for me, there was Gordon Baldwin, who taught me at school, and whose playful but original and artistically ambitious work I grew up with.  I took for granted that ceramics could and should be like that: modern, unbothered by convention, and a million miles from Bernard Leach and indeed the whole canon of studio ceramics.  But perhaps too, I learned that despite this distance from convention, there would always lurk within ceramics, the one central convention - the vessel, and the principle of containment.   I now realise that preserving the convention of the vessel is merely a choice, not mandatory; nevertheless I think in my recent work I have made that choice the theme and content of my work.

[Gordon Baldwin]
One of the conventions Gordon eschewed was the glazed surface, preferring a more painterly approach to the surface using engobes and multiple firings - a technique I found was not only thrilling and ambitious, but somehow more dignified than glazing.  But when I returned to ceramics after practising as an architect, I was working in a completely compulsive and spontaneous way; certainly the connection I had with Gordon at school I hardly thought about.  Throughout the RCA, it was all really a question of one discovery leading on to the next, with no real cultural or aesthetic intention behind it all.

[Matisse]
Just absorbing, or reabsorbing things that seemed to attract me, in an essentially unintellectual process.  So that I could become smitten by a particular Matisse (whose surfaces I didn't consciously realise were so close to those of Baldwin) and produce this strange hybrid of steel and clay also on the theme of light entering through a window.

[steel window piece]

If I did rationalise what I was doing, it was by dividing work that I looked at into opposing formal categories: the organic vs the architectural, or the gestural vs the mechanical; and I began to want to bring these opposites together.

[ Lanyon, Deacon, Smith, RCA fat rims]

Influence of Egypt; Rothko; essay on the problem of tone
Colour as an emotional register.