swallowing
by Andrew Lord
Swallowing is from a series of works I began in the early nineties representing seven gestures or actions: biting, breathing, listening, smelling, swallowing, tasting and watching. Their titles describe their construction. For instance, biting is built by sinking my teeth into the clay, breathing by pressing soft clay against my chest, listening, against my ear, smelling, against my nose and nostrils, swallowing, by pressing soft clay against my throat, tasting, by pressing my tongue into the clay and watching, by moulding clay around my eye and eye socket.
Sometimes, during making - for instance, in the case of swallowing, pressing clay against my throat - a transference occurred. The action of swallowing became swallowing made solid, separate; the action materialized into itself.
At sixteen, between grammar school and the Central School, I spent two years at my local art school in Rochdale, Lancashire, submerged into a wide curriculum of studio education. I can trace back to Rochdale my belief in the egalitarianism of disciplines, rejection of their mystification and a realization that, after practical confrontation, craft is a process, not a subject, inherent in every form of making; and clay, a material of art, not a category.