A kind of invitation
Swiss artist Roma Inderbitzin arrived in Egypt not knowing in what direction her work would lead -- that is until she discovered the work of local potters. She speaks to Nigel Ryan about negative form, submarines and the importance of open hearts
"Having received a scholarship to spend six months in Egypt I determined not to spend all my time in Cairo. The Swiss maintain a house at Shabramant, for the use of artists doing these residencies, but I spent very little time there. When I arrived I had virtually no idea what I would do here, or even what was possible. I began to draw, and spent much time just walking around. The city, of course, is really crowded, it is overloaded in many ways, not least visually, and I found myself beginning to draw a pot. I found that I was drawing all the time the same pot, in black and white, which was really the beginning of my pot story in Cairo.
I travelled quite a bit, and when I was in the New Valley, in Dakhla Oasis, I came across quite incredible examples of pottery. I spent quite a lot of time around the potters, watching, observing, seeing how they produced this stuff, these designs that had been around since ancient times and which seem barely to have changed at all. It was fascinating watching how these vessels were made, how they were fired, the techniques involved. And all the time I was drawing the pots.
When I returned to Cairo I showed these serial drawings in an exhibition at the Mashrabiya Gallery. I still have a lot of them but some sold. And in many ways this serial drawing reflected something of the process of making: the pots are, after all, endlessly the same shape. And when the form is finished they are placed outside, on the earth, row upon row, and left for several days to dry before they are eventually fired. And these rows, the pots lying there drying in the sun, looked very much like an installation.
The vessels were strange, they have such beautiful forms, forms I had not encountered before. I remember at the time I was in the desert, and I came across one of these pots and it looked exactly like a submarine. It was like walking on the sea-bed.
After the exhibition I felt that I wanted to go on, that the story had not yet run its course. But I had no idea how to do this, or what direction it might take. And then I met someone who asked me if I could help her make an exhibition in the autumn. Her aim had as much to do with marketing as anything more conventionally artistic since the main purpose of the exhibition was to introduce crafts from the Fayoum to a wider public. The exhibition was to take place at the Swiss Club in Imbaba.
And this was a way forward. I agreed, and that was when I first went to Nazla, in Fayoum, to see the situation there, to see how these pots were made. I then began to look for someone to help me, and together we created a project.
When I first went to Nazla what I saw were the pots, only the objects, and I did not pay any real attention to the manner in which they were produced. But as I became more familiar with the place the process began to be foregrounded, and it is unique. In Nazla they use a very particular technique to make the bukle, a spherical pot, and it became obvious to me that it was this process of making that must form the core of my presentation of the pottery, and that would impose itself onto my own work.
The potters work in small workshops, really not much more than shelters, built of clay. Inside there is a hole, a kind of hemispherical scoop in the ground. Straw and clay are mixed together, sometimes with ash. The material is in the hole, and it is hammered and turned at the same time. It is turned and hammered quickly, and it must be hammered all over, and in this way they make large globes. From these large vessels, these circular pots with a single hole, they make the vessels they need. The big pots are allowed to dry a little, and it is only then that the vessels are finished on the wheel. They do not change the essential form but rather turn that form into the vessel they want.
The holes are a kind of negative form, that is how I think of them. And this for me is very special. There is no wheel involved, no mechanical process. These vessels are not a result of mechanical turning but of the turning of the body, the rhythm of the body and the hole in the ground. People say pots have been made like this since Pharaonic times, but then people say everything is Pharaonic.
I asked the potters about the holes, and no one in the village knows when they were made, no one could remember. It seemed to me a bit of a chicken and egg thing: did the vessel come and then the hole, or the hole and then the vessel. These holes, these empty spaces, in some ways they are a gift.
There used to be a large market for these pots. They were used in the kitchen, for animal foodstuffs, for a whole host of purposes. But now there are cheap plastic and aluminium utensils, and an industry that once supported 150 families in Nakla barely supports a fraction of that.
While the Nakla pots are fired, they are fired at fairly low temperatures. And the use of straw, mixed with the clay, also inhibits strength. So even for ornamental garden use, they tend not to be too practical. They are not sufficiently fired to be entirely waterproof, nor are they strong enough to withstand cold winters, so export to colder countries is not going to be a solution.
The local market, the utilitarian aspects of the pots, these are perhaps over. Like this there is not a big future. But for me they are like pieces of art. They have less and less utility, and this gives them a different kind of sense. But there is the problem of how many people will look at them in this way, how many people will buy them.
So in one way when I was arranging their display at the Swiss Club the intention was to decontextualise the pots, to take them out of more expected frameworks, to allow people to see them as forms and shapes rather than objects that are supposed to have a utilitarian value.
It was interesting to be with the show: there were children about, and they spent a lot of time peering into the holes in the forms, or else they would step in the pots, in every second pot. It was nice to see the children playing with these things just as forms, as quite abstract entities.
To recover the utilitarian aspects of the pots requires much. It would involve changing the kind of clay used, and changing the way in which the pots are fired, and this is not so easy. We offered the potters a different clay once but it was not successful, it did not work with the techniques they used.
As regards my own work, I began taking photographs of the pots, in black and white. The photos will be the basis of my work, a starting point. I don't want descriptive images, photographs that you can look at and think this is a pot, this is this, this is that. Rather the photographic images serve as pieces of information, a record of something that exists but is recorded in black and white on paper. And the archetypal form that is recorded is the circle, and it is this that I will use, in black and white.
I do not know what the end result will be. I know only that I will concentrate on the form. Colour would be a distraction. This emphasis on form relates, I think, to the way the pots are produced, to the process used in Nakla, the kind of rhythmic repetitions that result in these vessels. I would like to show that this form exists in our minds, and our bodies, and in the spirit. And there is no technological intervention, there is no wheel, no machinery.
That form is here, it is in Nakla, it is repeated, it exists, it is only form and the idea of that form. And of course it has a history, these vessels have a history. I am not interested in describing that history, in numbering the years, though others might want to, others will ask about that history, will write about it. The way I see it is that the history is walking alongside the vessel, on a different but parallel path. It is not the focus of my interest, this ethnographic thing, but others might be drawn in that way.
The pots are archetypes, and are therefore in history, which is enough for me. And because the clay is mixed with straw, because it is fired at such a low temperature, the surface is open. When you touch the pots you sense that it is not sealed. They feel to me like open hearts: they are not packaged, they are just waiting for information to go inside. They are waiting for you, and you go to the pots. For me they are a kind of invitation. And they are beautiful because they are not closed.
