Blackware, smoked pottery.

Art Review by Sophie Alal

Published in The East African October 5th, 2009.

Elephant's Ears, by Tony Bukenya

Smoked pottery has been made for centuries in East Africa, as any visitor to the Uganda Museum or British Museum can confirm. It is a subtle and unique style of making ceramics that has evolved into what contemporary practitioners have dubbed “blackware” in modern art.

This magnificent finish to ceramics is obtained by first coating the clay body of the piece in slip and burnishing it with smooth stones. It is then fired in an oxygen-rich kiln to harden. The unique step in blackware is that a second firing in an oxygen-poor atmosphere produces dark smoke patterns, which can be surprisingly expressive.

The exhibition ‘Smoking Expressions’ at Makerere University Gallery showed new developments in this technique from four young artists.

One of the most intriguing pieces in the exhibition was Tony Bukenya’s piece ‘Corruption Stitched’. It is attention grabbing not for its aesthetic but because it is a crude little monstrosity oddly joined up with shoelaces. The piece was crafted by wedging clay, after which it was sliced in two, the insides scooped out and then stitched before burnishing and firing. Social issues have inspired the form of the piece: ugly art for an ugly subject. Whatever Bukenya’s intentions, the complicated shape kept people asking questions about its true meaning.

Another of his pieces titled ‘Ensuwa’ is a miniature pot with a large foot accompanied by a wooden-handled clay spoon.  It could easily have been popped inside a lady’s hand bag. Bukenya seems more commercially-minded than his co-exhibitors, as believes that his miniature pieces are more convenient to the clientele.

The most mature work in the exhibition was displayed by Ronald Mpindi, who demonstrated his mastery of clay as a medium. Untitled I is a three dimensional feat of balance and harmony. It is rectangular but not a cuboid – it is rounded off at the edges, and stands at an angle where one of its vertices is supposed to be. Opposite at the top an opening has been sliced which reveals the dark interior of the mysterious thing. With its smooth edges and shiny body, patches of red squares gradually give away to white quadrilaterals scored into dark body.

Mpindi’s experimentation also takes him into the realm of science fiction. A collection of black disc shaped saucers have unnaturally tiny mouths intended to be reminiscent of the flying saucers in iconic movies from the 1950s.

Although traditional African designs are common in his pieces, they also have an aesthetic which is unmistakably Japanese. Indeed he recently exhibited at the 2009 Ceramics Biennale in Korea. However, although his craftsmanship was superior to the rest, the beauty of some pieces was compromised by his insatiable desire to decorate. It would have been better if some pieces had been left plain and simple.

The third member of an old trio of collaborators is Ssekibaala Andrew. His ‘Fish VII’ looks like a shard of broken pottery, but a gleaming bead of white pops out at the end of what appears to be fish bones. Most interesting is his arrangement of the motif in ‘Fish VIII’ which reveals a circle enclosed by six white eyes with black borders, on a terracotta background, making it more floral than fish.

His technique displayed in two miniature pots and large bowls borrows a lot from ancient pottery, and he sticks to familiar basic shapes which confine his pieces to being less inspirational.

Perhaps William Mukwaya has secretly stolen some of the magnetism from the rest of the group. Only known through his work, he seems to have fallen into things due to networking, for he is a protégé of Mr. Ssekibaala.

His creations depict animal motifs and creations that seem to have been coaxed into life. The wall montage titled ‘Elephants Ears,’ is daring and challenging. It looks like a moth about to take flight, though it seems delicate enough to have been carved out of wood instead of clay.

From a distance his wall hanging titled ‘Zebra’ is vibrant with white stripes of engobe clay and black smoked stripes. Regrettably this is one of the few pieces that expose the clumsiness in a beginner’s first exposure, or the rush in creating pieces for exhibiting. For on close inspection patches of light brown clay manage to peep out from the spaces between the white and black Zebra stripes.

 He has brought with him a whiff of freshness to the exhibition, as it is his first time to exhibit with the original trio instantly making it into a quarto. Nevertheless he is already a street or two away from the conventions that drag down some of his contemporaries.

These artists have come up with enterprising ways to deal with a scarcity of resources.  Improvisation in the blending of alcohol and black stain to produce the red body stains is seen in the terrazzo effect perfected in Mpindi’s platters Terrazzo I and II, cutting out the need for expensive imported ores and oxides. Furthermore the white firing engobe clay is a constant presence in all the creations, a lively substitute for kaolin, although its brilliance is somewhat more subtle.

In Ssekibaala’s pieces, the rust coloured decoration in the clay body is mostly red ant hill clay. These improvisations are convenient, “Because we use a lot of material, you never know what you may achieve. You just go on picking the organic material around, from there you soak them in the stains and leave them to dry. Some you just rub on,” he explains.

Some of the work was overwhelmed by exterior decoration which began to compete with the decorations created naturally by smoke. However good they were, there was overkill with the etchings. Notable, however, was the striking peculiarity of the creations of Bukenya and Mpindi, having aspects of oriental style with graceful form, harmony and simplicity.

We are reminded in the exhibition by Associate Prof. Phillip Kwesiga that “works of art are always in transition and eventually acquire new spaces and new meanings.” As for the next stage of evolution of blackware ceramics, the centuries-old art form is very much alive and promoted internationally by Prof. Magdalene Odundo, whose brilliant displays grace the Metropolitan Museum of Art and private collections around the world.