Possible Fertility Symbol - Paul March  

Paul March started working in clay by accident when he joined a continuing education course on polymerisation. Mistakenly thinking he was going to learn about how to use resins, he found instead that the majority of the programme concerned ceramics. Even after having learned to appreciate the artistic possibilities of clay, it took Paul several years to make the jump between its primeval feel and the pristine, everyday ceramic objects such as toilets and teapots that are part of our quotidian. When eventually he did, he made a connection, not with the present, but with the dinner services belonging to his aunts in the 1960s.

Specifically, Paul had in mind a plate design which he remembered to be simultaneously flamboyant and restrained but for which he had no name. He found it easily enough on Google Images – Sienna by Jessica Tate.  More Google searches for Tate’s work brought him to the Midwinter range of vases, an example of which had been used by his mother for her flower arrangements. Pure white china decorated with a seething mass of coal-black vertical lines; the vase had been an inconspicuous backdrop to his childhood but now, with the image of one in front of him, he was surprised to find himself wondering whether the motif had been inspired by microscope slides of spermatozoids.

If so, the influence was subtle, unlike Paul’s own version of the Midwinter collection which was not. As he decorated the surface of the vase with swimming sperm, all heading towards its open neck, he was unsure whether it unwittingly supported the widely held view “of the pot as a womb” (Power and Tristant 2016: 1479) or whether his actions ironically undermined such a symbolic interpretation. Whatever the answer, the activity took Paul back to a family holiday the year before in southern Spain and a guided tour of the cave paintings of the Pileta Cave where, much to his amusement and to that of his wife and two sons, every few minutes the tour-guide would point to another pair of abstract vertical lines on the cave wall and exclaim explosively “Possible vulva!”, pronouncing the Vs, in the Spanish way, as Bs. Grinning  at the memory, Paul thought he understood a little better now what the sperm vase was doing.

Reference cited:

Power, R. and Tristant, Y. 2016. From refuse to rebirth: Repositioning the pot burial in the Egyptian archaeological record. Antiquity 90:1474-88.

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Paul March

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