Wannabe

Wannabe
1999

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

Size: 300 x 250 x 180mm

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. Wannabe, was cast from my own feet and produced from the same materials as Brierley’s Vanitas using the same method. There is nothing remarkable about my feet, although in this work I utilised material properties to explore ideas of maternal aspiration and displaced ambition. As a child, I attended ballet lessons to satisfy my mother’s desire. I disliked the experience and eventually persuaded her to allow me to quit, which I know was a disappointment. This memory re-iterated the pressure to ‘fit in’ to a mother’s ambition and more widely to societal expectations of what little girls should enjoy, want and do. In adult life, I acquired a second-hand pair of size 4 ballet shoes, which kindled an interest in re-visiting the memory of my ‘failed’ ballet career. However, although they were two sizes too small for my size 6 feet, in the development of Wannabe, I seized an opportunity. When fired, all ceramic objects shrink. In the case of white earthenware the shrinkage is around 15%. Because the objects were actual size copies of my adult feet, the firing process caused the cast feet to reduce in size. Consequently the size 4 ballet shoes now fitted prompting a sense that in some way my mother’s ambition could be realised—albeit as a relic to a ballerina that never was. Wannabe as a shrunken version of human feet acted as a counterpoint to the evidential deformities caused by squeezing into impractical footwear demonstrated by Brierley’s Vanitas.