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Collage – Smugglers cottage, Bonchurch, Isle of Wight by Oliver Cox; and Aquitane Spiral Charger by Jane Cox |
Father and daughter retrospective
A BACKGROUND in anthropology was one of the sparks behind ceramic artist Jane Cox’s passion for working with clay.
This weekend she and her father, the architect and artist Oliver Cox, present the second week of their first joint exhibition in a studio Oliver designed 50 years ago at their Parliament Hill Fields home.
Jane, whose work can be found at the V&A among other places, revealed that her first degree in anthropology helped develop her interest in working with ceramics. “I was drawn to clay – it is a material where you are accessing a world of objects,” she says. “Anthropology is about social rituals. I felt with ceramics you were making the objects that play a role in other people’s lives. You are making the vessels that inform the rituals of people today.”
Oliver was a leading architect after the war, working on social housing projects. His design skills, together with a lifelong belief in equality and socialism, took him further afield: aged 64, he was asked to work on an audacious scheme to rebuild the Jamaican city of Port Royal, which was destroyed in a hurricane in 1692. He had written a report for the Jamaican government about how low income housing and how to deal with the increasing problems of shanty towns, and so he was well known to government officials.
But Oliver and Jane’s work has now come home: there could not be a better place for the life work of an artist architect and a retrospective of the work his daughter has created than in the back garden studio in the house where Oliver and his late wife Jean brought up their family.
DAN CARRIER
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