Foundation Diploma in Ceramics: Exhibition

Posted on 3rd September 2024

This Foundation Diploma in Ceramics is a new course to West Dean and it aims to offer a comprehensive understanding of the material. Enabling students to gain a wide variety of clay techniques from hand-building to throwing, decorating and glazing work, that will develop skills and build up a creative language. After completing their first year, the students recently displayed their work: 

Artist Statement: Branwen Thomas

 

Branwen's home on a farm in rural Suffolk could not be further from her Welsh origins, but she recognises that over the years the landscape of East Anglia has seeped into her artistic consciousness, its vast skies and their changing colours often reflected in her work.


Drawing on her experience of printmaking and painting to inform her process, she is attracted to the weathering of both manmade and natural objects and uses these surfaces to provide visual prompts to create abstract landscapes. The texture and forms of shells, pebbles and flints are also a source of inspiration.


Using the techniques of raku and saggar firing with their unpredictable outcomes, tactile surfaces emerge, not dissimilar to those in nature, often with an elemental quality.
Her current project takes inspiration from the Suffolk coast with which she has become so familiar. The installation celebrates the seaside of Aldeburgh, known for its picturesque fishing boats and sheds and the colourful floats and buoys that adorn them. The thrown vessels join along distinct horizontal lines to reflect the linear horizons and open skies of this coastline. Their textures and tonal qualities, created using coloured slips and raku glazes, mirror surfaces weathered in a marine environment.

Artist Statement: Chelsea Ladish

 

Over the past fifteen years as a tattoo artist, I have honed my skills at turning client requests into coherent, visual representations of their life experiences. I truly believe that every tattoo is a marker of who, and where a person has been. In the same way, as a ceramic artist, l aspire for each piece to bridge the gap between lived, human experience and the chosen canvas of clay. I examine the connection between mind, and body of clay. With each piece, I am to explore the connection between the fluidity of thought and the tactile reality of form. Whilst primarily focusing on using mark-making as a form of story-telling, I believe that my work now speaks more of my own introspection and emotional responses. This has led to my pieces becoming more abstract in nature.


My creative process involves a combination of hand-building and wheel-throwing techniques, but the continual thread that pulls my pieces together is the method of carving illustrations and thoughts into the underglazes and slips, before bisque firing. My aim is to avoid planning at this stage, as the goal is to record my 'stream of consciousness'. In doing this, the outcome is more truthful, and a sincere representation of the vulnerability many artists feel when showing their final work. I find the imperfections of the hand-building process appealing. These imperfections are not flaws to be corrected, but rather markers of individuality and authenticity. I believe that just as the human psyche bears the marks of experience, so too does each piece, bearing the traces of it's creation.

Artist Statement: Caterina Salzano

 

Growing up, Caterina spent her summers in a fishing village in Southern Italy, where the vibrant hues of the coastal life and traditional, rustic Italian ceramics made a lasting impression. Caterina creates functional and playful terracotta earthenware. Combining bold colours and techniques, her vessels serve to create a visual feast to make any table sing - echoing the classic symphony of Italian food itself. The practicality and artistry of traditional vessels, from water and wine jugs with decorative motifs to pasta bowls with the splatter effect, are central to this body of work.


Throwing terracotta clay to produce rustic pieces decorated with graffito, slip, underglaze and glaze evokes the feeling of connection, a coming together of tradition and utility. Honoring her Italian roots, with the idea that tableware should be simple but never boring. For the artist - how handmade tableware is perfectly imperfect, much like life.

Artist statement: Ellen Hayward

 

Ellen Hayward is a British ceramicist and designer. With a background in woven textiles, her practice draws upon years of creating patterns. Her work stems from ongoing research into tiles, a millennia old tradition common all over the world. She is fascinated by the way a tile is functional, but also the perfect vehicle for imagery and pattern - providing a record of time, place and the constant interaction of different styles. Her work focuses on building surface patterns as a way of recording her surroundings. Most recently she has drawn inspiration from her own garden and an interest in recording plants often viewed as weeds.

There is always an element of organisation to her work - a need to find order whether this be in the rhythm of shapes, progression of a pattern, or harmony of colour. As a designer she is interested in our relationship with pattern, how we look for patterns to make sense of our environments and are often attracted to examples of order in nature. Her work also seeks to enjoy the decorative, often considered frivolous, but which has existed throughout time. Leaving a space open to create something which is totally indulgent, and joyful.

Artist Statement: Jane Colquhoun

 

I am a multi-disciplinary artist, interested in the materiality of both clay and cloth, where I explore the connections with human character and expression.


"The human face is the most deeply ingrained image in our brains. It is the two dots and a dash we connect with as babies. It is the focus of our attention in our relationships with each other. The face and the human figure express all we are." Dave McKean


My handbuilt ceramic heads evoke memories of various playthings drawing inspiration from diverse sources such as dolls, masks or puppets, Staffordshire figures or folk art. They may lapse into the comical, grotesque or minimal, depending on what influences I am processing as I work: a particular mood, an aspect of my textile practice, or an object in my studio.
I work as spontaneously and as playfully as I can, allowing ideas to develop through open ended free association with materials, objects and imagery, using a combination of techniques from slabbing, colling, moulding and throwing, applying the same unrestrictive attitude to decoration.

ARTIST STATEMENT: Kay Newman  

 

I like what isn't said and the space between things - whether it is the hidden meaning in a conversation or written sentence, or the negative space between objects. Art and literature influence my work, in particular the work of artists such as Morandi and poet TS Eliot and author WG Sebald.


I make non-functional vessels, thrown on an electric wheel, from white and black porcelain which is then either left unglazed or glazed with a range of homemade ash glazes from a variety of woods, such as ash, yew and birch. The vessels are often grouped together and are centered on a wooden or ceramic base.


My work has been influenced by ceramicists such as Edmund de Waal and Gwen Hanssen Pigott. I want to try and create the stillness these artists bring to their work. I love the apparent simplicity of their shapes and groupings. The shape of the pot is important and the composition of the vessels is as important as the making. Each piece is hand thrown and then trimmed to finalise the shape.

Artist Statement: Nicola Martin

 

With a background in languages, communication is key for ceramic artist, Nicola Martin. With an interest in ecology, originating when she worked on a turtle conservation project in Central America, the message she conveys through her work is often related to her love of nature and concern for the environment.


Nicola begins by creating agateware vessels as she feels the resulting pattern mirrors that of the striations seen in geological landscapes. These stoneware vessels then become the canvas onto which she paints, which is dependent on what she observes in the world around her. More recent and disturbing images of global warming have affected Nicola deeply and these images along with photographs from aerial photographers have inspired her to create a series of signature 'Earth Bowls'. The glazes are poured in a free and intuitive way, creating patterns and effects which resemble aerial views of the Earth. As with the agateware patterning, she enjoys the unpredictability of the outcome.


The work she has produced for this exhibition is a progression from her 'Earth Bowls' and was directly inspired by aerial photographers, Yann Arthus Bertrand & Edward Burtynsky focusing on the human impact on our earth. The finished pieces express her heightened awareness of the endangered nature of the Earth and form a visual record of its beauty.

Artist statement: Penny von Sprecklesen

 

A love of the natural world, filled with contrasts and contradictions informs Penny's practice.
The co-existence of paradox that can occur in nature inspires themes that have been emerging for her; namely between texture and smoothness, light and shadow, strength and fragility, symmetry and distortion.


Much of this is seen through the lens of changing seasons which has been explored in her current project. This has evolved further with the large, altered thrown and slab piece to consider the conflicting demands managed by women as they move through seasons of their lives. Here, her approach to mark making has used organic and manufactured surfaces that she encounters daily, impressed into the crank before highlighting this using oxides under a celadon glaze in reduction.


Pursuing the theme of contrast, she coloured porcelain with underglaze stains to create small agate ware pieces where colours of the year, as could appear across a sky or with light reflected off a body of water, are captured randomly while being thrown. A desire to understand the traditional skills of the craft potter has been a driving force in Penny's journey with clay.

Artist Statement: Lou Twist

 

Sculptor Lou Twist's natural, visual work explores her love of the landscape of the Peak District. Combining industria forms with natural glazes which complement the colours and features of the surroundings. Lous inspiration comes from time spent climbing both the natural and quarried gritstone in the Peak District; aiming to communicate this love through using the millstone to represent balance in the landscape and the climbs.
The quarrying of the millstones has left the scars on the rock and formed some of the world's greatest loved climbs.


Millstones are iconic and unique to the peak; discarded they blend into the barren, once industrial landscape now a haven for wildlife. These pieces attempt to incorporate this dichotomy and to both mimic and exaggerate the angles the fallen millstones have been left at. Using hand building sculptural techniques creating texture from gritstone itself, individual millstones are joined together and placed at their discarded angles sympathetically glazed.
The pieces are individually named to reflect integral elements of climbing such as trust and balance; between the climbers themselves and the delicate relationship between humans and nature.

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