‘On the Rocks’

Patricia Shone’s work is informed and inspired by the powerful landscape of the Isle of Skye and by the communities living there. Beneath the thin, eroding soils of the Highlands, lies the constant and immutable presence of rock, the form beneath the surface. The land is worked and there are visible remnants of human occupation going back for millennia. The surface marks left by our presence erode and distort in the weather, but the rock remains. Texture and form come together to represent container and contents; the outer and inner aspects of the human condition; the physical and the spirit.

She sees her work as an expression of the journey towards understanding her life; inseparable from her experience of living in this landscape or from the path that took her there.

The pieces are made by hand building, texturing, stretching and carving. Contrary to the compressive methods associated with traditional clay practice, her pieces are hand formed by texturing and stretching from solid lumps of clay. This process extenuates the surfaces allowing the natural textures of the material to develop. Colours are achieved most of all by the firing processes. The soft earthenware blacks and greys of raku firing; wood firing for warm earth tones and glazed stoneware; charcoal saggar firing within the wood kiln for dark greys and matt glazes. This gives Patricia’s work a wide range of textures and densities of surface and body, reflecting the varied geology of the land.