William Cobbing
"Raw clay has an abject quality of being simultaneously attractive and repulsive, causing a kind of sensory conflict or confusion when viewed being manipulated on video."
Could you tell us a bit about yourself and your background? Where did you study?
I remember heading up town from school to go to a Foundation Art open day at Central St Martins at the Cochrane Theatre. It was so exhilarating to contemplate the possibilities of focusing on art every day. After the Foundation year I continued at St Martins on the BA Sculpture course, trying and failing and trying again to figure out a kind of sensibility or identity. I talked to a tutor about where to go next for an MA, and he said maybe best not to be ‘squeezed through the toothpaste tube of London art schools’ and suggested I try de Ateliers in Amsterdam. This felt like the right move, and over the two years that followed there the performative element of my sculptural practice really evolved and took shape. The gallerist Fons Welters came to my final exhibition there and invited me to show this work in the front ‘Play Station’ space, which was my first step into the outside world as an artist
Your video series, starting with "Will.je.suis," was made in response to the beginning of the pandemic. How has the pandemic influenced your work overall, and how have you adapted your artistic process during that time?
The ‘Will.je.suis’ video series was a reaction to the solitary nature of life during the pandemic. I had mainly been shooting videos with a couple of performers, a camera operator and assistant, but that wasn’t possible with social distancing rules. So, I flipped the camera window around to make videos of myself alone in the studio. It tied in with certain life changes at the time, conversing with talking heads on Zoom, and people wearing masks. The clay head character loosely reflected this, buried under a suffocating mound of clay. The only way to show this work was by uploading footage to Instagram. It was an insular and introspective existence, with physical things translated to digital screens.
As with the monotonous existence at the time, I repeated the format of the videos, so they functioned like a diary, marking time and adding structure to my distorted routine. For some time, I couldn’t exhibit the videos in galleries with exhibitions postponed. So, coming out of lockdown and visiting the Princessehof Keramiek Museum in the Netherlands where they were being screened in the exhibition ‘Human After All’ was a hugely cathartic moment.
'Will.ni.naiz', 2022
Will.je.suis, 2020
'Meld', 2021, camera: Thomas Wootton, for LNCC and Maison Margiela
The Kiss 2, 2017
Your artwork often incorporates the use of clay, which seems to allude to bodily fluids and boundaries, and you've mentioned the concept of clay extending the body. In what ways do you think this connects to current discussions about the body in art, particularly in relation to social and political concerns like gender, sexuality, and identity?
Yeah, I think of clay as a slimy material, caught between states of solid and liquid. Unlike these two forms that remain separate from our body, clay sticks to us and disrupts the sense of our body boundaries, metaphorically linked to the way shit and spit can. Raw clay has an abject quality of being simultaneously attractive and repulsive, causing a kind of sensory conflict or confusion when viewed being manipulated on video.
The clay videos efface individual identity, with the protagonists becoming hybrid forms somewhere between sentient being and dumb matter. I like to maintain some mundane elements (like bare arms, or trainers) but the clay prosthetics make them part monster or mythic Golem. This immersion in clay allows the performers to become mutable, also applying to their gender which can often be perceived ambiguously.
In my videos involving two or more people, such as the recent ‘Screensaver’, the idea of communality and connection between people and earthy material is forged through their covering by a clay mass. So, individual autonomy is subsumed into a larger mass of clay and limbs.
Your ceramic sculptures are described as "humorous abstracted masks." Can you discuss the significance of masks in your work, and what themes or concepts they represent?
I made the ceramic masks while on a residency at EKWC European Ceramic Work Centre in The Netherlands in the summer of 2021. They were a response to the ‘Will.je.suis’ video series I’d just made, I was thinking about imparting a sense of presence and emotion from moving image to a static object, and about how to form a reciprocal relationship between the two mediums.
Cave forms started emerging, with undulating eye holes burrowing into the back of the lumpy clay head mass. Hollow heads were formed by thin sheets of clay rolled into netting, and rough eye and mouth holes cut out with the torn edges of the clay skin being reminiscent of the videos where wire cuts through the clay face. Hands featured frequently, emerging as antler-type extensions, and shielding the puckered surface of the face where the eyes would be. As with the videos, the sense of vision was replaced by touch, and the masks also felt that they were in the process of blindly making and remaking themselves.
'Screensaver', 2023
'Tenome 5', 2021, photograph Ollie Hammick
'cover version', 2022 Ollie Hammick
Humour seems to be an important element in your work. Can you explain why you incorporate it and how it enhances your artistic expression?
I guess humour is quite an elusive thing to talk about in relation to my work, as it’s often quite incidental, leaking out at the edges. It’s also uneven, there’s humour in some works, but not in others.
Sometimes the work elicits a conflicting reaction of laughter and flinching, with it being quite subjective as to which feeling is most pertinent to the viewer.
Humour often emerges from the physicality of my work, and so there’s a slapstick feel to it, a sort of mishap of clay falling to the ground with an ASMR splatting sound. The material I use is lowly earthy clay, and so the humour is low too, emerging from the lumpy fallible nature of our bodies, that we’re brought down by gravity and end up in the mud.
The figures in my videos often take on a deadpan demeanour, being expressionless, and languidly shaping the clay that encases them. They look like they’ve just walked off the street into the video, and so their casually neutral reaction to having clay on their heads emphasises the absurdity of their predicament even more.
Tell us a bit about how you spend your day / studio routine? What is your studio like?
I make my clay videos in my studio on Fish Island, in Hackney Wick. It’s quite a scruffy studio, so I can really play and make a mess there with the clay performances. I cycle there along the River Lea tow path, and this journey allows me to get into a looser headspace to think about ideas, and what I’d like to make. I spend time just pottering or doing nothing in the studio, and also a lot of quick drawings as a way of thinking through new ideas.
Making the clay head forms involves a lot of trial and error, testing them out and short rehearsals in front of the camera. Shooting the videos is the most focused and intense time, everything has to be ready and prepared, and then action!
I also work on the ceramic sculptures at home, and installed a kiln in the lean-to toilet outside in the back garden. The home studio is more of a methodical space, with shelves full of labelled glaze jars and dozens of clay tools, with an absorption in the rhythmical process allowing for new ideas and possibilities to emerge.
'The London Open' Whitechapel Gallery, 2021
Studio work-in-progress Hogchester Arts, 2023, photo Chantal Powell
'Written in Water', 2022 Public sculpture for Fish Island, Haworth Tompkins Architects, Peabody Housing
What artwork have you seen recently that has resonated with you?
I loved seeing Nicole Eisenman’s humorously languid bathing figures in Münster a few years back and have enjoyed seeing her sculptures ever since. Most recently, ‘Maker’s Muck’, a low-fi cartoony figure huddled over an ever-turning potter’s wheel, surrounded by studio detritus. It reminded me of Philip Guston’s studio paintings, with wobbly objects and tools lying around, and the artist character also sculptured in a similar register, so that they become part of the furniture in the environment they’re making in.
I was just over in Amsterdam a couple of weeks ago guest teaching at the Rietveld Academie, and had a nice conversation at lunch about the Dutch video artist Aernout Mik, and how inspired I’d been by his work as a student at de Ateliers where I’d had a few tutorials with him. His early videos of groups of people reacting to strange and unnerving scenarios, such as a collapsing building or lying on a vibrating floor, were totally mesmerising to me. I remember he’d told me he preferred to work with amateur performers, allowing them to behave in an awkward but purposeful way. There’s so much that can enter through the gaps when performance isn’t overly rehearsed and refined, and it was good to be reminded of that.
Is there anything new and exciting in the pipeline you would like to tell us about?
I’ve been working on a sculpture commission ‘Written in Water’ for Fish Island which has just opened, with works from this to be featured in a group exhibition this summer, but I have to wait for the official announcement before I say anything more! The commission involves ten cast iron manhole cover-like plates installed alongside the canal path. The casts are embossed with texts taken from oral histories about the local area, from the manager of Hackney Wick FC berating one of his players for nutmegging an opponent, to Michaela Coel’s recollections of her first play performed at the local Yard Theatre.
I’ll also have some smaller ceramic ‘cover version’ books, and ‘kiln devil’ figurative ceramics in a forthcoming group show with Canopy Collections. The domestic scale of these works allows them to be more accessible, drawing attention to a handheld quality of making and appreciating objects.
All images are courtesy of the artist
Date of publication: 20/04/23
