Alan Constable

Alan Constable is a multidisciplinary artist best known for his ceramic sculptures of optical instruments, particularly cameras. Born in Australia in 1956, Constable is deaf and legally blind; he began producing his ceramic objects in 2007 at Arts Project Australia, an organization that provides studio and gallery space to artists with intellectual disabilities. In addition to his acclaimed skills as a ceramicist, Constable is a prolific painter and draftsman, repurposing images found in newspapers and magazines. However, it is the colorfully glazed, mimetic representations of visual devices that garnered Constable’s international acclaim, and the body of work that constitutes that artist’s life-long interest in ‘seeing’ artifacts.

In order to make his ceramic cameras, binoculars, and telescopes, Constable works from referent objects ranging from household Leica, Canon, and Rolleiflex cameras to movie cameras, slide projectors, and obscure eastern European large format models. He studies the surface and shape of each referent with his fingers while holding it millimeters from his eyes. After committing the form of each object to memory, he recreates the device in clay, working quickly to model and assemble each individual component, such as the body, lens, viewfinder, and buttons. The pinched, pushed, and roughly to-scale clay sculptures slump in on themselves before firing and retain the artist’s fingerprints under brightly colored, wet-finish glazes. The evidence of Constable’s touch and the clay’s malleability emphasizes the object’s tactility and abstracts the sleek, functional form of the original machine.