Brierley’s Vanitas

Brierley’s Vanitas
1999

Media: glazed white earthenware - cast from the artist’s mother’s feet - and mixed media

Size: 300 x 300 x 250mm

Exhibited:

2013 – Unruly Objects (one-person exhibition), Cornerstone Gallery and Arts Centre, Didcot, Oxfordshire. 

2008 – Locations (one-person exhibition), OVADA, Oxford. 

1999/2000 – New Art, New Century (group exhibition), Potteries Museum and Art Gallery, Stoke-on-Trent.

1999 – Taking Stock (one-person exhibition), Keele University Art Gallery.

About this work:

The fragile yet vitreous materiality of ceramic is utilised in Brierley’s Vanitas and Wannabe. Though separate works, they have always been exhibited together as informal inter-dependants where the personal is explored through multiple identifiers of the female body, domestic space, the complexities of family relationships and social expectations. Both artworks are made from slip cast glazed white earthenware. Brierley’s Vanitas was made by casting my mother’s feet, which were misshapen by inappropriate footwear worn in her youth. My mother (Jenny) not only had bunions she also had hammer-toes. The combined effect made her already rather small feet look like they were being forcibly squashed into a smaller space even when bare and relaxed. Her deformities clearly resulted from pressure to wear fashionable styles of footwear and conform to social, institutionalised conventions of beauty. These issues prompted the creation of Brierley’s Vanitas, where I transformed the form of unsightly feet into pristine smooth glazed vessels for holding the tools and paraphernalia of a personal beauty and grooming routine. The work mimics commercially available and often cheap dressing table ornaments offering the same function, however it also creates a documentary relic through which Jenny’s identity as both fashion victim and mother are expressed.