By Jodi Moss
Published August 29, 2019
For 16 years, half a century ago, Plymouth had a zoo. As well as a visitor attraction, it served as a quarantine centre for animals entering the UK by sea.
Now, it’s the starting point for ceramic artist Matthew Raw’s exploration of the city’s history – and his wider meditation on the relationship between people and place, played out in a series ceramic artworks.
Tactile Change is Matthew Raw’s second solo exhibition (following 2017’s Clad), and runs from 20 September to 16 November at Plymouth College of Art.
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Building on his previous work, it uses ceramic tiles and sculptural works in clay to examine the evolution of the human landscape – particular the notions of migration and progress, as represented by the history of the zoo.
Tactile Change is a display of contemporary ceramics inspired by the themes of migration and progress, a meditation on borders in the post-Brexit landscape – and a response to the history of Plymouth Zoo.
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Raw’s work uses tile and clay to explore how human landscapes evolve with communities that inhabit them. His first solo exhibition in 2017, ‘Clad’, looked at the social evolution of East London. Now the artist turns his eyes – and his hands – to Plymouth, where he will be interpreting the story of the city and its short-lived zoo in clay.
Through ceramic tiles, block-printed clay and monumental works, Tactile Change uses the story of the zoo as the starting point to examine society’s understanding of progress and the individual’s response to change.
Although Tactile Change is a solo show, it is also a team effort – the result of a deliberate programme of collaboration and social making on Matthew’s part.
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As the tactile disciplines of making disappear from mainstream education in the UK, Matthew Raw has made the relationship between learning and making an integral part of his practice. In recent months, he has been working with children from Plymouth School of Creative Arts (PSCA) to prepare for the Tactile
Change project.
Matthew Raw’s involvement with PSCA stems from a mural project he is currently undertaking in collaboration with architects Feilden Clegg Bradley at the University of Warwick. Matthew learned that the firm also worked with Plymouth College of Art on the design for Plymouth School of Creative Arts, and that the school placed making at the heart of its curriculum. He decided that the students would make ideal partners for the Tactile Change project.
Opened in 1962 and closed just 16 years later, Plymouth Zoo served as a quarantine centre for animals arriving in the UK from overseas. Matthew used the story of an elephant temporarily held at the zoo as a starting point for PSCA children to consider ideas of migration, transience, containment and the
experience of quarantine. A number of the designs the students produced during this period have become motifs for a series of ceramic tiles to be installed as pieces of public art in the zoo’s former home in Central Park, at PSCA and as part of Tactile Change.
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In the exhibition, the elephant tiles form part of the installation ‘Routemaster’, an arrangement of large-scale doors and fences deployed around the Gallery that direct and restrict the movement of visitors through the space.
Alongside the PCSA pupils, students of Plymouth College of Art have also been instrumental in bringing about Tactile Change. Matthew , in collaboration with lecturers and technical demonstrators from Plymouth’s BA (Hons) 3D Design Crafts programme, has commissioned a number of the college’s current students to assist with the fabrication of a number of the exhibition’s ceramic elements.
In the interactive work ‘Progress’, Matthew has collaborated with metal specialist Noah Taylor to create an assembly of tile-clad walls and doors emblazoned with seemingly generic words that are instantly identifiable from the lexicon of politics and protest. Continuing this interrogation of language, in ‘The
Long Read’, Matthew presents a series of five terracotta prints made with hand-carved wooden blocks and bearing fragments of text that invite us to question our response to the everyday rhetoric of progress.
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Funded by Arts Council England, Plymouth College of Art and the city’s forthcoming cultural and heritage centre the Box (opening in 2020), Tactile Change is part of Plymouth College of Art’s biennial symposium ‘Making Futures: People, Place, Meaning – Crafting Worlds & Social Making’, which explores contemporary craft and maker movements as agents of change in 21st-century society. The exhibition expands on the themes of Matthew Raw’s previous work with Clad at the Ragged School Museum in East London and his collaboration with Assemble on the Art on the Underground project at Seven Sisters station – the material interaction of people and place.
“I grew up in post-industrial Manchester, which felt like a place where old and new architecture was always meeting in harmony or clashing around me. Since then I’ve found myself drawn to investigate the architectural scars of every city that I visit, investigating what impact industry and progress have had on
the communities that form there. Working in Plymouth has been a delight, learning about the history of the city and the forces that have shaped the southwest over the past century. I’m fascinated by the mixture of buildings new and old, and by people’s relationships to the notion of progress in the city; the
things they hope will change and the things they want to stay the same.”says Matthew Raw.
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