Claire Partington: Tea and Post-colonial Retribution

For some time now, London-based ceramic sculptor Claire Partington has been examining the intersections between historical English and continental ceramic figures and the empires that loved them. With an early apprenticeship in the stacks at the Victoria & Albert Museum and elsewhere, Partington sites her mock-Meissen/Staffordshire/Sèvres beings within porcelain-world pilgrimage sites such as Musée Ariana in Geneva; the d’Ursel and Gaasbeek castles in Belgium; the Bernardaud (china factory) Foundation in Limoges and, recently in her North American debut, at Seattle Art Museum and nearby Winston Wächter Gallery.

Partington is addressing the glories and gaffes that accompanied the rise of figurative ceramic sculpture, costumed and caricatured − symbolic and realistic human figures. As in 18th Century central and southern European manufactory sites from Vienna to Capodimonte, animals make occasional appearances. In the case of the accompanying exhibition at Winston Wächter wolf and bear heads function as interchangeable bottle stoppers for juxtaposes her “actors” as postcolonial commentator-intermediaries on an oval Italian table in the middle of the museum’s spectacular re-designed Asian and European porcelain holdings. Thanks to emerita decorative arts curator Julie Emerson at SAM, the Porcelain Room − which contains several hundred examples placed on shelves in dizzying mirror-backed, carved breakfronts − was designed to coincide with the museum’s new building in 2007 by Allied Architects which occupies the bottom nine floors of a 22-storey office building. The re-design of the porcelains was to serve two purposes: to display a greater number of ceramic holdings from two enormous bequests, those of Martha and Walter Isaacson (a local steel mill owner) and Priscilla and Walter Klepser (a childless, insurance-executive couple obsessed with Worcester porcelain) and to present the objects in a manner that encouraged close study and research.