Coco Crampton
Coco Crampton’s aesthetic has developed through “A process of borrowing, hi-jacking and reinterpreting from various periods in design history”. Coco's non-medium-specific practice reflects her dynamic and exploratory approach to making work, allowing for a fluid movement between different processes and materials.
This flexibility enables the artist to draw from a diverse range of techniques and traditions, including knitting, carpentry, ceramics, and printmaking, each offering its own unique set of possibilities. We caught up with Coco in advance of Plans for Living, her two-person exhibition with Louise Bristow.
Coco, Your work has an element of playfulness which is expressed through a range of mediums, how do you feel the different processes and materials work to communicate your ideas?
Coco: I’ve wanted to make installations that affect environments or mini universes which could include any object you might find in past or present material culture, tables, clothing, pots, chairs, architecture etc. Everything I present as an artwork can be seen in some way as found, it might be literally a found object, or a 3D facsimile recreated from an image or textbook, or as is the case with the pots shown in Plans for Living, found through participation in a tradition or craft - my quilted and knitted pieces would be in this category too. Although these finds bring with them memories from their past lives, when brought into my work they are affected and changed, and don’t necessarily operate as we might expect.
Image: Left: Louise Bristow, The Expedition (detail). Right: Coco Crampton, Wall Murmur
Where did your practice begin and how has it evolved over time?
Coco: I was born into an Acme house in East London in the early ‘80’s, and my childhood was spent in Norfolk where I grew up with my three siblings. My dad is an abstract painter and my mum was a textile artist. They ran a picture framing business and craft shop, supporting local artists and makers.
I studied painting for my BA at Norwich School of Art and Design but by the time I graduated I was making sculptural installations; my practice has continued to be predominantly three-dimensional ever since. I was lucky to graduate just as OUTPOST gallery was being founded in Norwich, and I became involved with the group of artists who were running the gallery and working in the city at the time. I didn’t have a studio but I kept being offered opportunities and finding ways to make work, either by getting help from friends who had access to workshops or making work in situ for exhibitions.
I started working with ceramics in 2008 when I moved to Yorkshire to start up a pottery. My term on the OUTPOST Steering Committee was due to end and I still hadn’t found a way to establish my own studio in Norwich, I needed a new adventure. I taught myself how to throw and started to build a business making hand-thrown domestic ware; I was interested in the kind of symbiotic relationship between art, life and work that had been a principle of design movements such as the Omega Workshops, the Bauhaus School, the Wiener Werkstätte and Morris, Marshall, Faulkner & Co. Although, after two years the business side of the pottery wasn’t a success, I took away from the experience the ability to throw, a relationship with the UK studio pottery tradition and love of Chinese, Korean and Japanese pottery. Without which the loose throwing, pulled handles, sense of organic growth and inevitability of form, visible in the pots shown in the present exhibition, wouldn’t have been possible.
In 2011 I re-entered education at the Royal Academy Schools in London, where I graduated with a postgraduate diploma in 2014. In the years following, my practice became more studio-based and I gradually set myself up to make ceramics again; picking up the skills from where I’d left off and using them to make sculptural pieces. All the sculptures in Plans for Living were thrown in my studio in London on a Leach kick wheel; they are glazed in glazes I mixed myself from raw materials and fired in an electric kiln.
Image: Coco Crampton Ceramics, Left to right: Can, Night Feeder, Down Pour, Swig, Spooler.
You enjoy playing with the language of objects can you talk a little about what draws you to design history?
Coco: I revisit objects from the past which were designed with a promise of some other way of living by designers attempting to reimagine the world and offer the possibility of a better existence. I’m interested in design failures as much as celebrated design icons, and the way a piece of furniture or an object can present a set of ideals, propose a solution, or reflect something about the society it is made for. By looking back at design movements, I try to tap into some of the energy that drove them and attempt to rekindle design aspirations that I feel are still relevant in the present day.
Coco: Your exhibition Plans for Living with Louise Bristow surrounds a common interest in the concept that form follows function and an artefact’s other functionality beyond being a jug or a chair, for example, how it can describe a place and time by its design. Can you talk a little more about your work included in the exhibition?
I’m excited about the exhibition because it will be the first time I’ve had the opportunity to single out a group of my pots, and show them in a more pared down way, and also to see what new conversations emerge when they are brought into relationship with Louise’s paintings. I’m showing a series of ceramics which resemble useable domestic pots, maquettes for architectural forms, or machines with an unknown purpose; they have tubelike protrusions attached to them that appear to be handles or spouts; they’re human in scale and there’s a sense of familiarity about them, however, they’re kind of impersonators really and don’t perform the functions they allude to. A few of them have titles which reference the act, necessity, or pastime of drinking, e.g. Night Feeder.
Image: Coco Crampton, Night Feeder
You also make knitted pieces that you have described as being quite nomadic and absorbing influence from the different atmospheres they are gradually made in, giving the finished pieces a slightly diaristic quality. Can you speak more about this?
Coco: Handknitting is unusual amongst the processes I work with, insomuch as it is not workshop/studio dependent and can be easily transported. I might knit a few rows on a train journey and then another few rows whilst waiting for my child to wake from a nap, another few whilst watching a film. The tension in each stitch and row varies ever so slightly, retaining something of what I was doing or thinking at the time.
What are you reading at the moment?
Coco: Charlotte Perkins Gilman: The Yellow Wall-paper and Other Stories
Could you tell me about your connection with the Charleston Farmhouse and how your lampshades came to be there?
Coco: I visited the house for the first time in 2013 and was intrigued by the colander-shaped ceramic lampshades that I saw dotted about, particularly the one hanging over Vanessa Bell’s table in the dining room. I started to think about what these objects had witnessed over the years and subsequently made a series of ceramic lampshades, The Truth About Cottages, for an exhibition in London. These then became part of a commissioned installation at Charleston, which also includes a large circular dining table, Horse Rub. These pieces are particularly important to me because they are in constant public use, activated by, and activating, people.
Image: Coco Crampton, Swig.
How do you see your work evolving in the future, and what new themes or mediums interest you?
Coco: I’ve recently made some new sculptures from plaster impregnated bandage and painted in household paint, I’m excited to see where they go and how they might sit alongside other works.
The title for this show Plans for Living is a theme that has interested me for a long time and I imagine will continue to do so, as I keep turning it over and looking at it from different perspectives. As a mother of a two-year-old, I spend a lot of time considering how the world looks from a child’s point of view - perhaps this will start to influence the work I make in the future.
As you may know, it is essential that we conclude with a studio playlist!
Please would you let me have a 5-10 track studio playlist? – this can be what you are listening to now or an ultimate playlist.
Little Brown Jug: Elizabeth Cotten
Children’s Songs: No.5: Chick Corea
Homesickness, Pt.2 : Emahoy Tsege Mariam Gebru
Evolution: Ablaye Cissoko
Mother’s Love: The Vernon Spring
Ceramic artworks pictured, courtesy of Coco Crampton and Belmacz
Plans for Living runs from April 20 - 10 May 2024
Opening Hours:
10am - 3pm Thursday -Sunday
Location:
Weald Contemporary at The Mill Studio
New House Farm Barns
Ford Lane
Arundel
BN18 0EF
By car: From central Arundel, Head South-West on Ford Road, slow past Ford Lane, turning right immediately after, follow the tourist sign for The Mill Studio.
By Train: Regular Services from London Victoria, Brighton and Southampton Central to Ford station. Walk south-west on Ford Road, continue past Ford Lane, turn right onto the footpath signposted for the Mill Studio.
All welcome but please leave pets in our courtyard or at home.