Victoria Gallery & Museum

Can it really be 25 years since ceramicist and sculptor Halima Cassell emerged as an artist? Fully-formed it seems. Her innovative, carved vessels had an immediate impact; firstly on galleries and audiences local to her Northern home, then gaining rapid momentum to national and international recognition. This beautifully illustrated and produced monograph is an appropriately rich celebration of Halima’s stellar career to date.

Born in the Kashmir region of Pakistan, Halima’s family moved to Lancashire when she was one. This duality of identity has both enriched her artistic vision, while also leading to tensions. Halima tells how she has been subject to racism in Britain, yet viewed as a ‘foreigner from England’ in Pakistan. Typically of Halima, she turns these challenges into positivity, as exemplified by her expanding multi-piece installation Virtues of Unity (2009 – ongoing) comprising hand-carved vessels hewn from unglazed, fired clays from all over the world. Each has a different design and is in a variety of tones and textures, rather like humans, and they symbolise that there is more that unites than divides us.

Although Halima began, and to some extent remains, a clay specialist, an award from the Royal Society of Sculptors in 2011 enabled her to study marble carving in Pietrasanta in Italy. Using power tools, rather than hand carving, the result has been exquisite sculptures formed in Halima’s signature style blending the geometric and the curvilinear. Other materials have been included in her repertoire: bronze, glass, wood and concrete. The sheer physicality of Halima’s creative process from hand-carved to rasping powered tools has sometimes led to the presumption that her work was made by a man. Rather than an insult, Halima takes this as a compliment. As she has said: “The real importance for me was the perceived visual strength of the work and that it was me (a small, slightly-build Asian girl) who made it! I like the idea of being strong through my work and creating a deeply convincing and meaningful impact through my thinking and making.”

Halima has an innate ability to visualise form in a material, and to carve out folds, contours and planes across and through her work. But where does she get her design inspirations from? It is geographically and materially diverse: from global travel and cultures, from architecture, from nature, from her own Islamic heritage and its mathematical principles of geometric design. Specific artists she cites as influences are M.C. Escher, Bridget Riley and Victor Vasarely, especially with regard to their systematic use of pattern. She credits Georgia O’Keefe for her way of looking at organic forms. Then there are architectural impacts from the richness of Islamic cultures in Pakistan and Southern Spain, Gaudi in Barcelona, the Victorian Gothic of Manchester and the Arts and Crafts aesthetic. It is extremely informative to read about the ways these influences percolate through Halima’s preliminary drawings, thought processes and working methods.

Two particular joys of the book are the glimpse into the artist’s combined world of home and studio and a revealing essay by her school art teacher, John Costello. With her partner Martyn, Halima has moved from a one-bedroomed flat/studio, to a semi-detached house working from the dining room and, in 2014, to a home and separate studio in renovated railway buildings in Shropshire, giving Halima the space to expand the scope of her work and reach her ambitions. Her output has always been impressively prodigious and John Costello attests that she produced three times the number of works for her final examination than the other students, and with a quality and maturity unusual for her age. Certainly, photos of her degree work reveal that her carving skills and instinct for pattern and visual rhythm had already emerged. It is touching to read that her teacher was also the first person to buy Halima’s work and to place a commission with her.

What is astounding, REALLY astounding, is that each of Halima’s artworks is unique; she manages to create something different and draw out something new every time. The other astounding thing is that she remains unaffected by her success – the awards, the major exhibitions, the MBE – and is still the engaging, enthusiastic artist, approachable and warm, that she ever was. This monograph is a marvellous record of her career so far, and the next 25 years are likely to be even more remarkable.