‘All creativity is based on destruction, the metamorphosis of one thing into another, the end of one entity or state, out of which emerges another’ – Pablo Picasso.
Complex and intricate, exuberant and elegant, Sandra Shashou’s new body of work, comprises of arrangements of smashed fragments of vintage fine bone china tea sets, Russian Lomonosov porcelain, Spanish Lladro and Nao ballerina figurines or German bisque Kaiser nude, dating back to the 1940s, 50s and 60s.
In Shashou’s creative recklessness, there is a comprehensive logic to her deliberate madness.
Coming upon her work for the first time in a gallery, you may think for a moment that you are beholding a classical frieze. The broken porcelain pieces curve round each other, evoking the battle scenes on the sides of ancient sarcophagi or temples, packed with duelling figures with missing limbs, and which have been reassembled, incompletely but meticulously, in the world’s great museums of Antiquities.
To use the classic nomenclature of artistic production, these works are reliefs, shallow sculptures set on the wall, a revival of an artistic form popular in the Antique and Renaissance, but which has been almost forgotten for centuries. Her material is the finest bone china and porcelain figurines collected from antiques markets and dealers. These are not the junky objets trouvés found in skips and flea markets which provide the material for so many assemblages of contemporary sculpture. Her tea sets, figurines and ballerinas, have been produced by Europe’s finest porcelain manufacturers.
Some may read a social comment in her work, a playful rupturing of bourgeois values. The order and tranquillity of a daily routine, with its echoes of Victorian Britain, Alice in Wonderland and social conformity, tea-time, has been literally shattered. Moreover, rather mundane materials have been used to create the characteristic brilliance and sheen of many high profile works of contemporary art. This is a body of work which celebrates craftsmanship while also questioning the role of art today, as a trophy of wealth, sophistication and success. Economists talk of ‘creative destruction’, and Shashou tells us through her cracked tableau, that we live in a world which is unsure about the economic conditions it has destroyed and created. All that gold, all that ornament, comes after all from nothing more than a tea set that someone didn’t want, a discarded luxury, like a broken Jeff Koons. This is the stuff you see littering the marble floors of a palace that has been ransacked. There is, some might say, a trace of revolution in Sandra Shashou’s work.
Shashou herself prefers to foreground the emotional and biographical metaphors embedded in the work. ‘Broken’ references bravery and courage, rebuilding, after devastation. Like rebuilding yourself after a broken love.
‘I see great beauty in vulnerability and fragility, in truth that is how we reveal ourselves and really connect.’
In a society seeking an image of perfection, ‘Broken’ has no flimsy facades’.
Smashing crockery is, after all, a time-honoured feature of the lovers’ row. ‘Breakage and fractures are part of the chance and fate of human life, part of our personal history.’ When Shashou has looked back on love that has disintegrated, and reflected on the times when she has felt ‘shattered’, she has realised that the splintered fragments of herself have come back together to create something more fantastical, better than before.
Something marvellous, glittering and new has been created out of an act of disintegration. Shashou herself likes to refer to the Japanese art of Kintsugi, in which broken bowls were repaired with beautiful golden joins, so fashionable in the 17th century, that people were accused of deliberately smashing valuable pottery so it could be remade in this manner. Collecting is an integral part of Shashou’s practice with a continuous search for her handpicked treasures, destined to be broken.
Shashou in her studio, punctures, chips and fragments. There is an emotional charge in the performance of smashing the delicate and precious porcelain collectables. The blows are decisive, ruthless and reckless. The intentional breaks are free, letting go of their previous identity and limitations. It is a brutal devastation of these chosen porcelain objects, which appear to be desecrated beyond repair, crushed into assortments of innumerable shattered confetti. Victims of tender explosions, now mere colourful fragments that reveal themselves, exposed from the inside out, they unmask our greatest fears, strip away our layers, open and undisguised.
Each work may be made out of hundreds or more discrete pieces. And yet shapes of the original objects are somehow preserved and repurposed. The graceful curves of the broken porcelain undulate across Shashou’s simple rectangular surfaces, or swirl around her rotundas with a baroque flamboyance, which belies the prosaic original uses of the material she uses, and engages playfully with art history.
In the alchemy of her creative process Shashou masterfully draws the fragments that unfold, like Jackson Pollock’s all-over paintings – only shattered, not splattered.
Shashou’s calculated disintegration and simultaneous resuscitation of these inanimate objects is bewilderingly beautiful, mesmerising almost, as your eye is drawn to the dynamics of so many shards of protruding porcelain resting on one another, committed to rebuilding with the broken shards one by one in a series of dramatic and positively innovative works.
The final configuration becomes a powerful, extraordinary, luxurious and profoundly complex form, with an intricate, attractive spill of decadent colours and splintered shapes.
