This piece, Extract, is one of ten objects Crafts Council acquired from Paul Astbury between 1974-6. It is immediately intriguing: is it the product of an archaeological dig? Did it fall to Earth? Is it from the past, or the future- from our civilisation, or another? It begs to be looked at from all directions. It’s remarkable what this maker has been able to evoke with oxidised porcelain, dolomite glaze, cobalt and iron oxides. Where work dealing in futurism that was made four decades ago could look kitsch today, this work still conjures a sense of a real future forty years from now.
Seen with the other pieces by Paul in the collection (which you can do by searching his name at our Collections Online site), Extract looks like an old mobile phone excavated from a clod of rock. Its form sparks off a Pinterest board of cultural references, from the BBC space comedy Red Dwarf to the pre-Colombian megaliths of Tiwanaku, the Aliens film franchise to school science experiments with Bunsen burners and crystalline solutions. The artist’s guiding influences at the beginning of his practice with clay in the early 1970s included “disintegrating machines, spaceships, capsules, dinosaurs and envelopes holding mechanical devices”, moving later towards “clay formed into artificial rocks, exposing electronic circuitry, robots and mechanical detritus.”
Dafydd: “Paul Astbury becomes more interesting to me the more I find out about him. He has been an influential contributor to postmodern sculptural ceramics. ‘Extract’ is the result of Astbury’s interest in science-fiction and is part of a series called ‘Synthetic Strata’, rocks that are split in a way to reveal fossilized technology. I think his objects raise a lot of questions. There’s an intriguing element to them, one which is hard to define and the result of a great imagination. He's created his own intergalactic archaeology, connecting the future with both the past and present.”
View on Collections Online