Quick Fire: Six Questions with Dr. Rachel Gotlieb
A curator and writer who specializes in ceramics, decorative arts, craft, and design, Dr. Rachel Gotlieb has played a significant role in shaping several cultural institutions in Toronto over the years, having held leadership and curatorial positions at Design Exchange, the Interior Design Show, and the Gardiner Museum.
She’s currently working on a new book titled Ceramics in the Era Victorian: Meanings and Metaphors, and will be returning to the Museum for a Gardiner Signature Lecture on Monday November 26 to give us a glimpse into her research.
In the conversation that follows, she lets us in on the most interesting discoveries she’s made while doing research for her new book, what spurred her love for art and design, and what books are currently on her bedside table.
You joined the Gardiner Museum in 2011 and played many roles over the years, including Associate Curator, Chief Curator, and Interim Executive Director. What curatorial project stands out to you most from your time at the Museum?
I would have to say that working with British ceramic artist Clare Twomey on her exhibition Piece by Piece was a highlight. To be honest, it’s always a bit nerve-wracking as a curator when you commission a work from an artist because you are unsure of the result. This was partially the case with Clare but the more we discussed the project the more exciting it became, and seeing the final installation was magical. Our long conversations about making, crafting, and collecting ceramics were inspiring.
You’re currently writing a book titled Ceramics in the Era Victorian: Meanings and Metaphors. Can you share with us the most interesting piece of information you’ve come across during your research?
Well if I answered that question no one would come to the upcoming lecture! Seriously, there is no single piece of information that I found per se, but it is the amount of literary and visual references that I discovered and collected that astounded me. Artists used pottery as way to convey symbolic meanings to enhance the narrative of their works, and their audiences enjoyed searching and deciphering these hidden and not-so hidden messages. I loved discovering how jugs could serve as attributes of gender or metaphors of life, for example.
Your writing previously focused on modern and contemporary Canadian design. What prompted this shift toward a more historical subject matter?
I have always had a deep love of Victorian painting, literature, and pottery, which I credit to my parents Allan and Sondra Gotlieb (my father being the collector and my mother, the reader). Since I grew up surrounded by Victorian visual and literary culture, it was a natural step when I decided to pursue my PhD to explore these passions in a deeper and more scholarly manner.
If you could inhabit a Victorian novel or painting, which one would it be and why?
I love this question! If could inhabit a Victorian novel, I would choose George Eliot’s Middlemarch. I would try to bring Lydgate and Dorothea together, and I would tell Lydgate that there is nothing wrong with Blue Willow and to stop being such a snob. If I could be in a Victorian painting it would be William Powel Frith’s A Private View at the Royal Academy because I could bump into Oscar Wilde and ask him what he thought of the canvas he was looking at and I hope I could offer some witty insight in return.
How would you characterize contemporary attitudes toward ceramics in England versus Canada?
I wouldn’t say there was necessarily an England/Britain versus Canada. As I pointed out in my exhibition for the Gardiner’s focus gallery, Connections: Canadian and British Studio Ceramics, many Canadian potters went across the pond to apprentice with Leach and Cardew, and Canada enjoyed a British clay invasion with the likes of British-born potters Robin Hopper, Roger Kerslake, and John Chalk settling in Canada, or Canadians completing MFAs at Cardiff or Stoke. That said, one major difference I have observed is that Canadian ceramists for better or worse are not shackled by the legacy of the arts and crafts movement on the one hand or the declining industry of the Potteries in Stoke-on-Trent.
What’s at the top of your reading list right now?
Top is the right word here. My bedside table is a tower of books, which I always try to get to and never quite succeed. On the top are the biographies of Kenneth Clarke and Joseph Duveen, two powerhouses who shaped the art scene in the previous centuries. I hope I will finish those by Christmas, especially since one of the books is borrowed.
Dr. Rachel Gotlieb will be giving a lecture on ceramics in Victorian art and literature on Monday November 26. Learn more and get tickets here.
Image: [1] William Powel Frith, A Private View at the Royal Academy, 1881 [2] Clare Twomey, Piece by Piece, 2014 [3] Dorothea Brooke and Will Ladislaw from Middlemarch by George Eliot [4] Robin Hopper, Covered Jar, 1983, The Raphael Yu Collection