Through 40 Years in Clay, nationally recognised maker Anna Lambert presents a new collection of handbuilt earthenware ceramics celebrating the landscape.
Influenced by a practice of landscape drawing, these works evoke Anna’s emotional attachment to place – her own valley in Yorkshire and the land around her mother’s home, amongst others.
She creates three-dimensional paintings through her work; carefully considered forms merge with surface scenes of trees, field edges and orchards. Assembling her pieces from slabs of clay, she then alters, cuts and fettles them, occasionally adding sections of texture from carved or linocut designs. Through her surface designs she explores narratives relating to climate change in the local landscape and the regeneration of orchards.
In this poignant exhibition, Anna explores a newfound sense of space, light and simplicity in her forms and surfaces. She also implements new colours made from mixing slips, oxides and body stains to bring more subtlety to her palette.
Jenny Southam hand builds figurative sculptures in terracotta clay. She delights in exploring colourful gestural mark-making over their surfaces. This painterly decoration aims to echo the emotional resonance of each piece.
“When I enter the studio I am searching for that serene state of absolute absorption that making and drawing can gift us, which we all wish will, in some manner, enrich our audience.” – Jenny Southam
In a career spanning nearly 50 years, ceramicist, Sophie MacCarthy has developed a unique and distinctive personal style. Through her subtle and bold use of coloured slips, painterly brushwork, stencils and wax-resist, she evokes the colours, forms and movements of the passing seasons. Often focusing on the ground, she finds beauty in the accidental compositions created by wind-blown leaves, stalks and detritus sometimes gathered around a storm drain or scattered over concrete and tarmac, juxtaposing the vibrant colours of the natural world with the gritty textures of the urban environment.
‘She has a poetic insight into the natural world’ David Whiting
Throughout his long career Peter has always sought pathways to the development of new ideas. Often this is a slow process, but sometimes a particular event speeds things along.
Partaking of two residencies in China recently, where Peter worked in porcelain at high temperatures, led him to develop a new body of work, made alongside his existing practice to which Peter is still deeply committed.
This new exhibition represents the outcome of Peter’s working practice.
'This exhibition explores objects that express a quiet equilibrium: fragile, shifting forms that exist in a state of delicate imbalance. Their stillness is easily disturbed, as if the act of holding too tightly might cause something essential to disappear. The works reflect an interest in forms that resist perfection, remaining slightly unresolved, unsettled, and quietly alive.' Akiko Hirai