In this bold group show, we bring you new work by two accomplished and risk-taking makers working at opposite ends of the UK.
Sarah Jenkins works from her house and studio surrounded by farmland in North Essex. Patricia Shone has been living and working on the Isle of Skye for the past 25 years. Though surrounded by starkly different landscapes, these artists both use clay to express their responses to the land.
Each artist favours handbuilding as a making process, embracing textured and carved surfaces that possess a raw, tactile quality. Patricia’s works achieve soft earthenware blacks and greys through raku, wood and charcoal saggar firing, while Sarah embraces satin like surfaces, some bearing graphic line work and others revealing abstract patterns of colour. Both bodies of work are organic and elemental in nature, sitting in harmonious dialogue with one another.
Join us in admiring this elemental collection full of detail and nuance.
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
