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.
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Sue’s work draws on the quiet resilience of trees and bones—forms shaped by time, marked by fragility and carrying memories of growth and decay. Through slow, receptive hand-building, each piece develops as if guided by an internal rhythm. Textured surfaces hold lines like weathered stories, while a soft matte glaze evokes a sense of calmness.
‘My hurt, my joy, my scars, my healing, all shape the work I create in clay.’ – Sue Mundy
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