Intimate Objects

SERIES: WAYS OF WASTE

Intimate Objects
A Conversation with Ceramicist Alice Foxen

9 May 2024

To celebrate the launch of the IAS publication Wastiary, Think Pieces is publishing a range of contributions that are inspired by the subject of waste. Ceramicist Alice Foxen finds inspiration in discarded objects that she discovers in the streets, and she turns those encounters into delicate and intimate sculptures. In conversation with Think Pieces Editor Marthe Lisson, she talks about what motivates her practice, the beauty of ‘wasted’ objects, the versatility of the material clay, and she shares her thoughts about waste in the ceramics industry.

Marthe Lisson
How did you find your way into ceramics?

Alice Foxen
I think I always knew that I was going to art school because both of my parents went to art school. On my foundation course, I was actually doing a lot of metal work and was finding it very difficult to manipulate it quickly and easily to sketch out ideas. So my tutor gave me some clay to model ideas out and I just found it to be a very immediate medium. That was my way into it. I didn’t really focus on ceramics until after my BA. I did my BA in Brighton and it was called 3D Design and Craft. It was a foundation course in materials, with wood, metal, ceramics, and plastic. I did major in ceramics, but it took that interim period between BA and MA of almost eight years to refine what I actually loved about clay. It is such a broad material, and you can do so much with it. You can be sculptural, you can be functional, you can make it look like something entirely different. You can focus on glaze, you can focus on clay, on form, on materiality.

Now I’ve done a masters. I graduated from the Royal College in July 2022 and I think all of that time from the age of 19 to the age of 33 now, has been a fascination with material and a curiosity for what it can do and how it can surprise me. I think that’s what I like about ceramics. You put something in, you make this mixture, you give it rules, you think you know what it’s going to do. You create a recipe and then you give it over to the force of the kiln and its heat, and it will change. And it will give you something that you didn’t know before. And that’s what I’m aiming for every time: to create something I didn’t know about.

ML
I love that, this aspect of letting yourself be surprised. And it does not only apply to the material you work with. It is also the source of inspiration.

AF
Yes, that’s what I love about being inspired by discarded objects, I don’t know about them. I don’t know when they are going to appear to me, and they are taken out of context and it’s always a surprise. They can be humorous; they have a character sometimes. Like “oops, this appeared on this corner, with some other unexpected object and they have just been left there!” Because they’re ‘waste,’ and because they are just disregarded, no one is looking at them in my mind apart from me. Nobody is taking a picture of the thing on the floor, everyone is taking pictures of the shiny thing in the sky. It’s finding something I don’t know about. It’s finding that uniqueness and recording it. It is something I find worth doing.

ML
How do you transfer these objects into your work. You are not just making small scale replications of them.

AF
I don’t tend to work from images even though I take a lot of photographs and collate them into groups… and I will look at them, but I won’t work from them directly. It is more about this sense or the feeling I got from that encounter and the different things that I’ve been looking at. They are all grouped together and, in my head, become one universal object. The thing I make is never directly linked to one thing. It’s sort of abstracted and maybe a little uncanny, but I also like to echo the stillness of the moment.
My colour palette is coming from my own imagination. It is faded, a little bit nostalgic sometimes. Texturally trying to mimic some of the qualities of fabric, plastic or road surface.

ML
Texture seems to be very important to you. Sometimes you post pictures on Instagram of the objects you found in the street and then one image of the object you have created from that encounter. Very often, it is the texture that links them.

AF
I’ve done work that has a shimmer to it, the lightness of the foam or sometimes the way things are slumped. Maybe I moved away from this now. But I was definitely thinking before about the movement of my pieces. Even if it’s a little awkward for me to stand there and take pictures of rubbish – people sometimes think I’m from the Council – , I have to take a picture because otherwise it’s going to go, or I won’t get the quality I want from it.
I realised on the way here that I almost exclusively now take pictures of soft things. Maybe because I’ve been more interested in making pillows out of this latex fabric.

ML
Your little pillows look so soft that you want to squeeze them. This element of turning a solid material into something that looks soft and fluffy, I really like about your work. Also, the combination of soft materials, like the latex, and solid materials. Sometimes when I see pictures of your objects on Instagram, I can’t tell whether the latex might just be a super thin sheet of ceramic. You said it at the beginning of our conversation, you can use the material clay and turn it into something that doesn’t look like clay anymore. I find that fascinating.

AF
[Looking at her objects on the work bench]
It’s funny to look at how things go in cycles. I’ve always been on the same sort of thread. One thing goes to another to another…

ML
There is a nice continuity in your work. It always evolves around the same subject, but you’re looking at it from different angles.

AF
Sometimes I think I work too tightly. Maybe I’ve come to that point again where there is no sign of my own hand in my work. I try really hard to irradicate any sign of my own making. It’s like “It’s just there, it just appeared.” I feel like I need to expand, things have gotten too enclosed and I need to break out again. But that will be in the new year.

ML
What is it exactly that fascinates you about discarded objects? You have alluded to it, but is it that only you see them? Or that you have only this very moment to capture it because the next moment the actual Council might take it away? Or is it the surprise?

AF
Sometimes they can be very beautiful. A slumped mattress might have a really nice line quality to it. And they are very intimate objects. I don’t know whether I’m so interested in the social aspect of peering into people’s lives and what different people leave out. It’s funny what people don’t care for anymore, it’s public! As soon as people lose the attachment to it, they don’t care that everyone can see it.

ML
Interesting that you mention the intimacy of some of those objects because you turn them into quite intimate objects again. Your objects are rather small and delicate.

AF
I want to keep a sense of empathy towards the thing that I find. To not necessarily make it beautiful again, but to give it a new appreciation.

ML
And to give it the attention that it didn’t get at the corner of the street, or at its former home?

AF
To give it time.

ML
And permanence. The original object is being discarded. Who knows where it goes? You give it a permanent afterlife.

AF
I like to use repetitive processes that are often quite time consuming for no other reason than the process being meditative. And that echoes my approach to research, to find material to work from. It’s like stopping. Mindfully looking. And then mindfully making.

ML
Apart from the untargeted research that happens in the streets – how do you research? What else is part of the process?

AF
I’m not very good at talking about what I read. Materially, I do a lot of testing. I’m starting to get into the chemistry of why that reacts this way and that doesn’t.

ML
[Looking at a foamy-looking piece on Alice’s work bench]
Why is it doing what it does?

AF
This foamy-looking material has got frit in it. It’s basically a glass power that is commercially made and you use it as part of the glaze. The silica in the clay has a very high melting point and the frit brings the temperature down and lets it flux at the point that it should flux. If you mix it with clay, it will react and puff. So, in various degrees, it will increase its size.
I can do a lot of tests, but sometimes it won’t do exactly what I want, so I have to sit with it for a while.

[Looking at another piece, a cut-off]

A lot of my work looks like food, like ham! [laughs]

ML
That reminds me of your experiments with banana peels at the Royal College. It is also another link to our topic of waste. Materially, you work with waste too.

AF
Yes, the potassium in the banana peel gives it a colour, a toasty effect.
Probably, I’m not that waste-conscious in my practice here. It’s conceptually centred around waste, but materially not wasteful. I work on such a small scale that there really isn’t that much waste. I use all the moulds again. Maybe plaster I do throw away.
Or let’s say, I’m conscious of waste, but not necessarily in a directly environmental way. I remember realising the gravity of working with ceramic at the RCA when I decided that this is it, I’m not going to shift [to another material]. Once you make something, this could exist for thousands of years. It’s not going to go in the bin after the show, and so it’s committing to the question of “Do you want this to exist?”

We are very waste-conscious at the Bartlett. Students make a lot of moulds from silicon and we are planning to buy a machine that grinds up old silicon so you get it in granules. And then you can bulk up a mould using a third of the amount of silicon you’d usually use because you mix it with old silicon. I wish you could recycle plaster. Plaster is dug up out of the ground and then it’s dehydrated and then in the mixture of water and plaster you rehydrate it. You can’t recycle it by dehydrating it again.
More and more, I’m talking to students about firing or not firing ceramics. And how do you make bricks? We were looking at a project in Gent with the students, where they are mixing old powdered concrete with clay and not firing it. But they are able to build with those bricks still.
It’s quite hard to source the origins of raw materials. All the raw materials are mined, often not from the UK but globally. Stuff like cobalt has a really bad history of really unethically mined oxide.

ML
Is there an awareness about where materials are sourced in the ceramic community?

AF
There is an interest in using locally sourced material.

ML
How locally sourced can it be?

AF
A lot of students source clay from sites that they work on and they come in with a lot of clay that they want to filter. I had a student digging up a load of clay from the Thames and I was like “I’m not touching that!” It’s not good stuff.
Ceramicists are a drop in the ocean. They might buy a small amount of frit or flint, but actually, that’s being used for big industry electronics. I think there’s cobalt in iPhones.

ML
What’s not in an iPhone…

AF
Yes! There’s silica in microchips. I’m also thinking about that when I’m using these materials. We are a tiny element of a massive industry. It’s big business. It’s sometimes easy to be cynical, like why are we using recyclable bags when Amazon is cutting down the rainforest!? Of course, every little step helps. It is about creating a culture and it’s good to be mindful of where things come from.

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The Wastiary. A Bestiary of Waste was published by UCL Press and launched at the Institute of Advanced Studies on 11 Janury 2024.

ALICE FOXEN graduated in 2022 from the Royal College of Art with an MA in Ceramics and Glass. Since then, her work has been shown with gallery Cavaliero Finn and is stocked at Camden Art Centre. She has recently been selected for the European Ceramic Context exhibition in Denmark. She is also an Assistant Technician at the Bartlett School of Architecture.

MARTHE LISSON is the Editor of Think Pieces.

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Editing by MARTHE LISSON

Proofreading by ALANI HICKS-BARTLETT

All images by MARIAM GOMEZ