Geoffrey Swindell Reliquary Urn. 1998.

At the start of the third year of the BA (Hons) Ceramics Degree course I was working on a three sided container, but not knowing at that stage what it was going to hold. My visual research for this were my sketches of an eighteenth century gravestone, photocopies of Las Vegas buildings including Coca-Colabottles, Cadillac cars, Mini cars, Venetian gondolas and elephants. I do relish working directly from research, combining different images together in my imagination. I also like working directly with the clay to form shapes and patterns, without designing the object beforehand. For this container there are no paper designs. The starting points for the shape of the container was a prow of a Venetian gondola to form the sides and an eighteenth century gravestone to form the front. I used the shape of a Las Vegas neon sign to form the handle for the lid. I modelled in clay, Coca-Cola bottles and turned them upside down to form the two front legs. Cadillac car wings turned through 90 degrees formed part of the container’s sides. I had partly constructed the container when I had a tutorial with my third year Ceramicstutor Geoffrey Swindell, who is also a British ceramic artist. We talked about the work and jokingly I said it could be an urn for someone’s ashes who is interested in cars and Americana and Geoff replied jokingly, said it could be for him. So after the tutorial I then personalised the urn for his ashes.

​Once the urn was kiln fired I gave it a car paint finish using silver cellulose spray paint and clear lacquer. I used pink enamel paint for part of the Cadillac car wings. As it happened I had fortuitously constructed a three sided container and this three sidedness came to stand for the spirit, soul, body, combination of a person, in this case Geoff. Black ‘vinyl’, ‘leopard’ skin, the silver paint finish, other car details such as headlamps give other visual links to cars. I also used silver leaf to highlight parts of the urn, in particular the cross on the handle, to link into crosses found in cemeteries. Rose transfers symbolize cemetery flowers, red for mourning and black for death. I also made a transfer of Geoff from his University ID card, placing that transferon the front of the urn. The urn sits upon a plinth which link it to memorial statues and statues in general.

​Upon making this reliquary urn I decided to make other reliquary urns during my third and final year of the BA (Hons) Ceramics Degree course, for other people that I found particularly interesting.