Christopher Headley has a long and distinguished career internationally in the arts, as witnessed by an impressive C.V.
He was born in York and studied at the York School of Art before majoring in ceramics at the Central School of Art in London. His lecturers there were Michael Casson and Gordon Baldwin, which meant that he had a thorough grounding in ceramics as well as other art disciplines. Another pivotal influence was Richard Slee, then a recent top graduate at the Central School of Art, who was employed as a technician for a year by way of helping to further his career. Slee went on to become one of Britain’s most important contemporary ceramic artists. Many years later Chris invited Slee to Monash on the art faculty’s International Artist- in Residence programme. Chris gained an M.A. from the Canberra School of Art in 1991 and in 2000 was awarded his PhD. from Monash University Victoria.
He has exhibited widely internationally whilst lecturing at many tertiary institutes in Australia. Eliding any entrenched position in the field of ceramics he developed a Pop Art sensibility. His heroes were the American artists Oldenberg, Kienholz, Warhol and super object maker Richard Shaw. In his early student days, he had honed his mould making skills to a high degree, enabling him to utilise the slip-cast system; with the resultant objects being decorated with decals that he made himself using the screen printing process. He has consistently created outside the box as it were, so it is no surprise that Surrealism was to be the lynchpin of his art.
Chris is an inveterate traveller and, soon after graduating from the Central School of Art, he meandered his way to Australia via the Middle East and Asia, absorbing various cultures and artworks, and a few years later he travelled through North and South America. Eventually returning to Australia he moved to Adelaide, which was witnessing the advent of Skangarovian Funk, formed by a breakaway group of clay workers revolting against the limitations of the prevalent Anglo- Oriental style of pottery. At this location, with enlightened patronage, he was commissioned to undertake several public art projects.
He was constantly expanding his aesthetic sensibility and began experimenting with installation art. Chris stated that casting enabled him to bring a new dynamic to the work via multiplicity. His first foray into this area saw him exhibit some 50 slip cast racing cars circling around a central space. The visual effect was that they seemed to be moving and, with this kinetic element in mind, he decided for his next exhibition to take over the whole floor of a large gallery where 500 cast clay cars were displayed.
Chris’ public art projects centred around neglected or sullied post-industrial sites, prior to them going through a time of restoration, around the city of Adelaide. At an old factory site in Port Adelaide, he depicted three dolphins in white paint using a wide roller, and, at another abandoned industrial site, using white marble dust he drew the image of a cyclist. All these were recorded using photography from a light aeroplane as drones did not exist at the time. When later he undertook a PhD, it incorporated much of his strongly held environmental beliefs. His submission won a prestigious academic award, which is no surprise as he produced ambitious large scale Land Artworks. One of which was a huge landscape drawing depicting Chris’ version of an oriental carpet on a salt lake, of which there are many in the interior of South Australia. Its linearity was achieved by using a rudimentary wooden plough which, upon furrowing through the top few inches of the white surface, revealed a dark layer underneath. The site of the lake was a place where a century earlier Afghani camel drivers rested with their charges en route to supply the arid interiors of Australia. On a large sandbar, at the mouth of the River Murray, he drew a coastal steamer.
This artist has undertaken many residencies within Australia as well as in Japan, Taiwan, North America and Spain. At Ballarat in Victoria, the centre of the gold rush of the 1850’s, a single large Installation Artwork was a memorial to the thousands of Chinese who tried their luck on the gold fields. It consisted of a large, raised bed of sandy soil from which dozens of slip cast ceramic shovels, pickaxes and other mining tools covered in chinoiserie decals, protruded out of the “ground” like a massive archaeological dig. All the various residencies offered Chris the freedom to make manifest his ideas connected to the history of the area whether it be in Asia, America or the Antipodes. The accumulation of imagery and the tempo of his ideas were now assisted by the advent of digital technology.
Chris constantly scours flea markets and junk shops for inspiration. The seemingly disparate objects he finds are used to create moulds producing cast ceramic replications, which are then carefully positioned to create surrealistic tableaux, enriched by his chosen decals.
His dreamlike compositions are the result of his ability to juxtapose the disparate elements. As he states, “memories guide the assembly of images creating a history such as the broken fine china plate, cast corvids and discarded toy planes are resurrected in clay giving them a new lease of life so they may “fly” again”. The latter aeronautical imagery, from his childhood, often appears like a thread throughout his work, whether in his ceramic assemblages or recently in his idiosyncratic oil paintings.
A suite of works entitled Lost Worlds, is predicated on the memories and emotions concerning his natal place. Chris spent his childhood in a small Yorkshire village, his beloved playground was the nearby derelict Pocklington Airfield, which had been constructed during World War 2 to accommodate Wellington bombers and their crews. By 1950 the site was abandoned to become, for Chris and friends, a vast, easily accessible playground that included concrete bunkers, a control tower and endless runways where they could play their imaginary war games. Many hours of “derring do” ensued where Chris imagined himself as a fighter pilot in the Battle of Britain. Spiritually he returns to the lost worlds of the long-ago airfield, on whose remembered runways he took off on a personal art journey, always on a contemporary flight path. His constructs make visual a mix of fantasy and reality, presenting a world of wonderment that has guided and shaped his identity as an artist.
Chris has continued to breathe new life into his trove of sourced objects; as he says, it is about seeing things, not just looking at them. This resurrection of discarded bric-a-brac is, in art terms, Up-Cycling. Many of the assemblages can be read as trophies of boyhood, where endless childhood hours spent on the runways of his dreams are now orchestrated into narratives, cloaked in the artist's experience, maturity and wisdom. Chris himself seems to have metamorphosed into the elements that make up his amalgamations. His work often evokes quiet reflection where we remember the good times, now tinctured by sadness and, as the artist states, that sentiment is present in some of our aesthetic responses to nature itself.
The advent of Covid coincided with the ceramic studio, adjacent to his home from where he worked, becoming unavailable. This did not deter Chris, he instead converted a room in his house into a painting studio. His switch from three-dimensional works to oil painting has given Chris the freedom to reflect on countless stored images and re-examine earlier ideas, formulated on the long-ago airbase playground of his childhood, pushing them in new directions whilst exploring new surrealist conceptions.
Of his paintings Chris states that “my work expresses ideas that challenge our habitual perception of the world around us. In part they express feelings for the natural world and the multifaceted relationships we have with it. They are motivated by and respond to the provocation of things seen in passing. I carefully select original objects or images for their perceived associations which I then subject to alterations. Thus, the transformed and redesigned image becomes the subject of each of my individual paintings. Whilst my paintings are representational, I am not greatly concerned by “realism” as a goal in itself. My primary interest is in perceptional ideas”. In Chris’ narrative paintings he attempts to infuse the image with an existential question or conundrum, which does not necessarily exclude their content indicating something more obvious or literal. In a playful way he finds that enigmatic scenarios have a greater capacity to “feel” compelling and universal. This is one of the essential qualities Chris strives for in his works, whether in his paintings or his ceramics.
In his career, multi-skilled Chris has successfully navigated many disciplines in the creation of his artworks, such as Mould Making, constructing Super Objects, Assemblages, Up-Cycling, Decal Making, Photography, Hand Building and Pot Throwing. He has created many large-scale Land Art projects, undertaken Public Art Commissions and has exhibited several Installation works. His current surrealist paintings not only incorporate the long ago aeronautical adventures but now deal with environmental matters, where we glimpse magical worlds where nature is magnified.... Edens which we dare not lose. Chris’ strength of vision elides whimsy or mawkishness. The terms “childlike” or “simple” do not apply, as his paintings display a strong focused lyrical clarity of vision...direct and uncluttered from the multiplicity of his ever-fertile imaginings.
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