‘There was a child went forth every day, And the first object he looked upon and received with wonder or pity or love or dread, that object he became, and that object became part of him for the day or a certain part of the day…or for many years or stretching cycles of years’   Walt Whitman

How we hold onto objects and how objects hold onto us? is the question that goes to the heart of what has preoccupied Olivia Horley whilst making work for her latest exhibition, The Call From Things. It speaks to her experience of growing up in a family that saved and preserved objects over centuries, handing on letters and artefacts from one generation to the next, not rooted in one place but shipped across continents and seas. Objects have been an anchor.

While making, Olivia has been interested in how a particular aesthetic spontaneously resurfaces when taking creative decisions about an object. She says “I have repeatedly found that an aesthetic relates to a half-remembered object, like the shadow of an object, imprinted in a store house of familial object-archetypes. Objects repeat their draw on us in this way, becoming life companions.”

One such example is a small pueblo bowl from her mother’s childhood in Mexico which followed the family through America to England and then left for Sweden where her mother settled. The bowl has a simple cross painted rim to rim. The cross motif has found its way into Olivia’s work before (scored on the side of a big bowl or marked in the scalloped quarters of a vessel), but this time a deliberate echo of the pueblo bowl is painted rim to rim on a series of vessels. The pueblo bowl repeats its draw. Not least of all, because Olivia lost her mother this year, and in sorting through her belongings, came across the little bowl again. Objects, non-verbal, embody our relationship to the world, materialise memory, externalise emotion. In this way, Olivia adopts the cultural materialist’s idea that objects help us to think. 

Included in the exhibition is a sculpture, Golden Cage c.1974, by Olivia’s grandfather Edward Renouf. The construction of the piece, an assemblage of objects (used cast-iron farm tools), has exercised a strong influence on Olivia’s practice. She is interested in the way we live with objects in a room, ceramic vessels often present among them. Through this assemblage a material narrative is made. The objects draw on each other as well as ourselves, combining and recombining; what the French anthropologist Levi Strauss termed bricolage. Olivia’s ensembled maquettes are a playful response to these ideas and her grandfather’s sculpture. She works with clay fragments found in the studio, cast-offs from the process of making vessels that call her attention, like the draw from objects. These are combined with finds collected during walks, whether natural or man-made.

Olivia’s vessels remain firmly in touch with notions of use - they are pots to be used and loved on a daily basis, pots to enter the narrative of objects in a home, pots to become full of people.

The current pieces were not made by weighing out clay, measuring proportions with callipers as is the custom in repetition throwing, but rather by wiring off approximate lumps of clay, judging by eye, allowing ever more for the variation that is the handmade. Olivia believes it is this process that connects us with the thingness of things and our own materiality, which allows us, both maker and user, to be sensitive to the call from things.