Phil Cornelius (1934-)
Born in 1934, Cornelius studied at San Jose State University, California and took his M.F.A. in 1965 at the Claremont Graduate School, coming under the influence Peter Voulkos and other so-called Abstract Expressionists in the ceramics world. He is currently Professor of Art at the Pasadena City College. His works are in the collection of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the Victoria and Albert Museum among others.
Cornelius has produced some of the most radical and important works in the transfiguration of the teapot. The works are intricate in their layering of content. They are also highly contradictory. Indeed, these objects are very much about contradiction and can be both highly specific in terms of their metaphor and yet retain an ambiguity that saves them from becoming trite.
Firstly, the teapots are made from paper-thin sheets of porcelain. this gives them a sense of fragility, delicacy, refinement and vulnerability. Their source references and metaphors, however, deny these physical qualities. Early teapots drew inspiration from the structure of World War I tanks and armored vehicles. These vehicles were simple blunt forms, almost crude in both appearance and method of construction. They also carried with them a clear sense of function while appearing pugnacious and brutal. Their purpose was to traffic in violence and death.
The tanks were replaced with shapes that alluded to early aircraft, metaphorically linking the notion of flight to the lightness of the forms. Later, airplanes gave way to the ship. Always the relationship was to a metal “container” but in these pieces the sense of violence returned, spurred on by the surfaces of the pots and by the references to military hardware. The method of firing often left the surfaces scarred and charred as though the vessels had escaped a furious fire-- which indeed they had in the kiln-or had taken the brunt of a fierce explosion or shrapnel blast.
The most current teapots have gone through a reductive metamorphosis. These forms have a serenity that is new to the work, suggesting gentle adobe architecture rather than sharp edged metal forms. the surfaces are tough and flinty, but no longer burnt, pitted and scarred. Literal issues have faded and a tough abstraction has taken over. The tension remains, however, between being tough and hard and being fragile and vulnerable. These are objects about beating the odds, about survival; and speak about the thin dividing line between life and death. They are primal investigations through the metaphor the humble teapot. |
