Tuesday, July 2, 2019

Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Firing: Exploring the Ceramic Process as Rite of Passage

Great thanks, Patrick.

I forwarded that information from another liststerve.

Ngozi May Okafor whose ongoing PhD in ceramics Firing: Exploring the Ceramic Process as Rite of Passage, involving working with "Zulu potters in South Africa and Ushafa potters in Nigeria, as well as her own creative ceramic work" at  the Centre for Visual Art at University of KwaZulu-Natal, is the person to see in connection with more info on the post.

Another ceramics practitioner and scholar you could see is Ozioma Onuzulike at the University of Nigeria, Nsukka. He is very active in scholarship and very helpful. Ato Arinze is another Nigerian ceramist I have found very helpful.

In terms of articles on ceramics in Africa, I have found African Arts journal to be very helpful. This includes older articles in the Volume 22 , No. 2 issue and  the  "Ceramic Arts in Africa" Vol. 40, No. 1, Spring, 2007 special issue.

Using Google and Google Scholar I have encountered  more recent publications like  Adam Posnak's 2018  "Sacred Ceramics: Investigating the Production and Significance of Ewe Ritual Ceramics in Ghanawhich can be compared with Lisa Aronson's 2007 Ewe Ceramics as the Visualization of Vodun, both of which articles I have attached here.


I hope this is useful. 

My own approach to such culture centred research is to both study in depth the approaches to the subject within a particular culture and juxtapose this with approaches to the same subject from other cultures, exploring how these diverse contexts may illuminate each other.

Along those lines, I would be interested in what mutual insights could emerge by comparing theories and practices of pottery in Asia, the West and Africa. 

Within that context, one could see such examples as the work of British potter Bernard Leach and the influence on him of the Japanese pottery tradition, leading to his being described on his Wikipedia page  as promoting  "  pottery as a combination of Western and Eastern arts and philosophies. His work focused on traditional Korean, Japanese and Chinese pottery, in combination with traditional techniques from England and Germany, such as slipware and salt glaze ware. He saw pottery as a combination of art, philosophy, design and craft – even as a greater lifestyle. A Potter's Book (1940) defined Leach's craft philosophy and techniques; it went through many editions and was his breakthrough to recognition."

My particular interest is in interpretations of pottery in terms of ideas about physical, biological and metaphysical space, evoked by the interaction between the empty space around which the potter shapes a new form, what is shaped and the person doing the shaping. 

Related to this are ideas about the fecundative space of womb in Igbo ceramics as described by  Obianuju Umeji in "Igbo Art Corpus:Women's Contribution" in Nigerian Heritage,  Vol.22,1993,96,  and on analogies between creation in pottery and cosmic creativity and on the essence of being as a void around which consciousness constellates, as described by Daniel Odier of the ideas of the teacher of Hindu Kashmir Shaivisim Tantra teacher Lolita Devi in his Tantric Quest, 1997, 41,55-6, 164-5.


thanks

toyin

On Tue, 2 Jul 2019 at 07:06, 'Patrick Effiboley' via USA Africa Dialogue Series <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com> wrote:
Dear Toyin,
Thank you for this post. I was approached yesterday by a student who want to work on ceramics in Se, one of the specialised cities in this craft. Though I am not her supervisor, I want to hel her. Do you have some articles in PDF you can send to me for her. ANy advice or references is also welcome.
Hope to read you soon.
Patrick



Le mardi 2 juillet 2019 à 04:17:47 UTC+1, Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju <toyin.adepoju@gmail.com> a écrit :


About Ngozi May Okafor's project: In many societies, the practices of pottery-making and initiation rites seem to be in decline. Researchers of both rites of passage and pottery (together with its broader category, ceramics), therefore, continually seek new ways of interpreting the practices in order to sustain and enliven them. My interest in the processes of pottery making among indigenous potters has led me to go beyond the finished product to reconsider the performative 'art' and 'act' of creating potteries. In several native cultures, the process of creating pottery is likened to childbirth; it can also suggest a people's state of being. Furthermore, pottery wares are seen as having humanoid qualities. What relationships exist between pottery and rites of passage? With the growing need to creatively design rites that mark individual and group transitions from one state of being to another, how can those relationships inform creativity in passage rituals? Moreover, what creative ideas might those relationships stimulate for self-expressions through installation and performance? Combining my practice as a ceramic artist and research with Zulu potters in South Africa and Ushafa potters in Nigeria (both of whom also practice initiation rites), this study will explore possible parallels between pottery/ceramics and rites of passage, with a focus on their transitional phases – firing and liminality, respectively. Contextual and documentary reviews, fieldwork, and studio experiments will be the methods of data collection. Deploying rites of passage theories, Firing: Exploring the Ceramic Process as Rite of Passage shall bring fresh perspectives to the ways in which ceramics practice can be viewed, re-interpreted, and also present broader narratives for self-expressions. The project will result in both a written dissertation as well as an exhibition and catalogue of visual art works resulting from the study's creative explorations.  

---------- Forwarded message ---------
From: H-Net Notifications <drupaladmin@mail.h-net.org>
Date: Tue, 2 Jul 2019 at 02:12
Subject: H-AfrArts: Announcing 2019 Ivan Karp Doctoral Research Award Recipients
To: toyin.adepoju@gmail.com <toyin.adepoju@gmail.com>


Greetings Olowatoyin Adepoju,
A new item has been posted in H-AfrArts.

Announcing 2019 Ivan Karp Doctoral Research Award Recipients

by Corinne Kratz

African Critical Inquiry Programme Announces

2019 Ivan Karp Doctoral Research Awards

                                                                                                           

            The African Critical Inquiry Programme has named Bronwyn Kotzen and Ngozi May Okafor as recipients of the 2019 Ivan Karp Doctoral Research Awards. Kotzen is a South African student pursuing her PhD in Human Geography at the University of Cape Town. Okafor is a Nigerian student doing her degree at the Centre for Visual Art at University of KwaZulu-Natal. Support from ACIP's Ivan Karp Awards will allow each to do significant research for their dissertations. Kotzen will do research in Johannesburg, South Africa and Lagos, Nigeria for her project, Abstracting the Concrete: Tracing the Political Economy of Infrastructure in Africa Through a Study of Cement. Okafor's research for her project Firing: Exploring the Ceramic Process as Rite of Passage will include work with Zulu potters in South Africa and Ushafa potters in Nigeria, as well as her own creative ceramic work.

 

            Founded in 2012, the African Critical Inquiry Programme (ACIP) is a partnership between the Centre for Humanities Research at University of the Western Cape in Cape Town and the Laney Graduate School of Emory University in Atlanta. Supported by donations to the Ivan Karp and Corinne Kratz Fund, the ACIP fosters thinking and working across public cultural institutions, across disciplines and fields, and across generations. It seeks to advance inquiry and debate about the roles and practice of public culture, public cultural institutions, and public scholarship in shaping identities and society in Africa through an annual ACIP Workshop and through the Ivan Karp Doctoral Research Awards, which support African doctoral students in the humanities and humanistic social sciences enrolled at South African universities.

****************************************

About Bronwyn Kotzen's project: For the first time since post-WWII industrial modernization, the significance of infrastructure has emerged as a point of broad consensus for critiques of untenable models of current economic growth. This has marked a radical global policy shift to development at the urban-scale, which Africa has only recently begun to mirror. Yet, the complex and interconnected geo-political and economic forces that drive Africa's urban development and produce its infrastructures remain largely obscured. This project seeks to read contemporary processes of infrastructural development in Africa through the material lens of cement in order to formulate a much-needed post-neoliberal interrogation of African urban development. Second only to water, concrete is the most widely consumed substance on earth. As concrete's raw material, cement is the foundation of modern development and is therefore the project's primary site of investigation. The research moves beyond individual localised sites and cases to draw out generalisable patterns of development at a regional level, outside of the particularities of place and time. Pan-African cement flows are traced as a 'matter' of the political economy of infrastructure. This offers a reading of the continent not as a bounded geographical location but rather as series of spatio-temporal interconnections that make visible the myriad of global influences, relations, and shifting formations of development hierarchies. Combining politics and economics with geography and materiality reveals the far-reaching and connected places and powers of which Africa is composed. Working across disciplines and registers, Abstracting the Concrete attempts to advance the theory, method, and critique of infrastructure in the postcolonial world, toward recalibrating a meaningful African urban studies agenda.

 

About Ngozi May Okafor's project: In many societies, the practices of pottery-making and initiation rites seem to be in decline. Researchers of both rites of passage and pottery (together with its broader category, ceramics), therefore, continually seek new ways of interpreting the practices in order to sustain and enliven them. My interest in the processes of pottery making among indigenous potters has led me to go beyond the finished product to reconsider the performative 'art' and 'act' of creating potteries. In several native cultures, the process of creating pottery is likened to childbirth; it can also suggest a people's state of being. Furthermore, pottery wares are seen as having humanoid qualities. What relationships exist between pottery and rites of passage? With the growing need to creatively design rites that mark individual and group transitions from one state of being to another, how can those relationships inform creativity in passage rituals? Moreover, what creative ideas might those relationships stimulate for self-expressions through installation and performance? Combining my practice as a ceramic artist and research with Zulu potters in South Africa and Ushafa potters in Nigeria (both of whom also practice initiation rites), this study will explore possible parallels between pottery/ceramics and rites of passage, with a focus on their transitional phases – firing and liminality, respectively. Contextual and documentary reviews, fieldwork, and studio experiments will be the methods of data collection. Deploying rites of passage theories, Firing: Exploring the Ceramic Process as Rite of Passage shall bring fresh perspectives to the ways in which ceramics practice can be viewed, re-interpreted, and also present broader narratives for self-expressions. The project will result in both a written dissertation as well as an exhibition and catalogue of visual art works resulting from the study's creative explorations.

 

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

            Information about the 2020 Ivan Karp Doctoral Research Awards for African students enrolled in South African Ph.D. programmes will be available in November 2019. The application deadline is 1 May 2020.

 

            For further information, see http://www.gs.emory.edu/about/special/acip.html and https://www.facebook.com/ivan.karp.corinne.kratz.fund.

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