Ceramicist Richard Slee discusses his piece 'Crown and Anvil', in the V&A Museum's Ceramics collections. Filmed June 2009 in conjunction with the forthcoming V&A show Richard Slee: From Utility to Futility, June 5 2010-April 3 2011, curated by Amanda Fielding.

Transcript:
Crown and Anvil is a combination of two major themes or ideas that I had at the time. One was the anvil and I made two versions of the anvil, the first anvil was an anvil on its own. It was a symbol, and it was a symbol of, to me, at that time, 1988, the break up of the old Soviet Union and the satellite countries, the breakdown of the Iron Curtain…Although I thought that was a good thing because it gave people freedom, I worried about the idea, the ideal of Socialism and I thought that the anvil was an ideal symbol of Socialism, it’s a workers’ symbol, symbol of strength, of workers’ power. So I made my pottery anvils and there’s an ironic idea that they’re actually absolutely, totally useless objects because as a functional object you just cannot use it. If you hit it, hit the anvil with a hammer, it’ll shatter. The other symbol is the crown. I am a Republican and I was quite fascinated by the hype and hysteria of various royal weddings in the ’80s. Charles and Diana had been a major event, just the silliness and the romanticism and escapism of royalty at that time. This piece is meant to be an anvil where the crown has just been freshly wrought, made, so it’s hanging there. The maker, whoever has made the crown…It’s a fairy’s crown, in a way, it’s the size of a child’s crown…it’s a fantasy crown. So the maker has just finished making it and hung it there, waiting for someone to come up and crown themselves, I suppose. The mid- to late-’80s was a period of work where I was heavily reliant on symbolism. There was a series of cornucopias which was about opulence and over production, decadence, and decadence seemed to be in the air. This was post Punk and New Romanticism. I was neither a Punk nor a New Romantic but there was a feeling…of an age which I thought during the Thatcherite government was becoming more and more, to me anyway, more and more decadent.

The anvil, in a way, although the spike of the anvil is textured, is relatively plain, relatively simple, for me, anyway. The decoration, or the dots, or the jewels are made of dots of coloured clay which have a clear glaze over them. So the colour is in the clay itself so it’s much brighter. The rest of the glazing is a combination of similar types of glaze sprayed one over another to produce particular colours. It fits in with, it sinks into the texture and emphasises this extruded base here. The anvil itself is simple matt white glaze on the top and a blue glaze with a pink glaze sprayed over the top of it to give it a little bit of depth and oomph.