Tiago Mestre

 

Tiger, tiger, burning bright,

in the forests of the night

 

Centro Cultural Britânico Brasileiro, São Paulo, 2019

 

   Tiger, Tiger has as background the work of Bernard Leach (1887-1979), artist, potter and educator, regarded as the father of “studio ceramics”. Leach was important in leading and fostering a critical and passionate dialogue between the long ceramic tradition of the East (Japan, China and Korea) and the context of the British Arts and Crafts movement. XX, in laying the foundations for successive generations of artists who have made pottery an alternative to mainstream artistic expression. Leach was a man of ideologies, in crisis with the context in which he was inserted and was able, throughout his life, to make productive the fundamental questions with which he struggled. I was interested in understanding three fundamental aspects of Leach’s work: the idea of ​​ornamental grammar, considered as expressive ideology, the result of the artist’s hand and mind about the craft production of utilitarian forms; the hegemony of these same circular forms, resulting from a potter’s lathe production (technique) and, finally, the question of the design of domestic utilitarian objects, placed as a place of resistance to the discourse of modern design within a largely industrialized western society. . These points draw a triangle, something like a discursive triad upon which, in my view, Leach’s problem rests.