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Unpacking Alexandra McCurdy’s boxes

Ceramics Art & Perception, Dec, 2009 by Gloria Hickey

FOR MOS OF HER PROFESSIONAL LIFE AS A CERAMIST, Alexandra McCurdy has painstakingly created containers. Lidded jars, vessels like tiny chests decorated with motifs taken from textiles. Mi’kmaq quill boxes, quilts, and hooked rugs have supplied a rich source of decoration: tiny stitches as neat on the back as on the front, practical, beautiful and obedient. Women’s work. Transplanting textiles to clay is one way for Alexandra the potter to tell her story. Her mother designed textiles for manufacture in upholstery and Alexandra grew up in a Victorian styled household dominated by women. She gravitated to pattern, the repetitive rhythms to be found in window curtains, upholstery and carpets. She found comfort and the illusion of control in pattern and would bring these things to her own ceramics. Eventually McCurdy questioned the confining social roles of women and would pursue a Master’s degree and thesis about feminism and craft, especially textiles. A new body of work emerged of ceramic quilts with photographic images of people and objects. These quilts are openly autobiographical. They would be followed by prints of women’s lingerie and even clay houses that document the generations of women in her family.

However, in time McCurdy returned to making containers that merged the techniques of textiles and clay, decorative surface and form. They are boxes–exquisitely constructed of a warp and weft of slip. They are microcosms built of fragile layers with screen-like optics. Sometimes we can see a face inside or a delicate captured butterfly. The box is such a potent metaphor because it is the perfect vessel for containing what we cannot control. Putting a lid on strong emotions or a fragile life. It is tempting to wonder about the autobiographical story they might hold in their shadows.

Alexandra has said she is fascinated by the “black box” but instead of the black box of history and photographic illusion I thought of the black box associated with airplanes. This is the black box we seek to retrieve after a crash; the box that holds the final story and helps us put together the pieces. To me, this is the promise of Alexandra McCurdy’s most recent group of containers. The boxes are the expression of a mature artist. One who has endured many ups and downs and still seeks to understand her world through her hands.

Alexandra McCurdy Talks About Her Porcelain Boxes

MY WORK HAS LONG BEEN INSPIRED BY TEXTILE patterns and motifs drawn from the intricate quill and needlework of indigenous Mi’kmaq and women’s textiles, by my research into Western textile history, the central role played in it by women and by my mother’s personal involvement in the British textile industry earlier this century.

My new series of boxes are a logical progression, with a few different and notable features. In earlier work, the slip trailed textile patterns and symbols were applied to the surface of the ceramic piece, fired and then glazed. With these latest boxes, the coloured porcelain slip is trailed, layer upon layer, in opposite directions, until enough thickness is built up to support itself. I am, in essence, weaving the slip, with a warp and a weft. Each component is fired, then wired together to form a box and embellished with coloured computer wire, metallic thread, raffia or ceramic textile symbols such as the spiral, used by women over the centuries.

Component making is often the solution for women artists whose lives are fragmented by children, homemaking and other jobs. It is a way to work for short periods of time, in between other duties
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