Since coming to Stoke, inevitably, much of my thinking has been about ceramics. I read Emma Bridgewater’s Toast & Marmalade which got me thinking about the perfect pairing of dishes to meals and ceramic pieces with the ability to transfer us to other places. All relevant to my wider concerns and interest in images.
This train of thought seemed to come to a head when I came across this egg shaped salt and pepper shaker I found at a charity shop. A neat, satisfying pairing.
I have since started learning how to make moulds for slip casting and have plans to make sculptures and tiles that also function as vessels of sorts, bringing much of my thinking together.
It has been a while since I have posted anything on my blog. I have been busily working towards my interim show, Holes In The Hedge, in the window of AirSpace Gallery. I deinstalled yesterday and this marks the halfway point of my 6 month residency! Time is flying.
Holes In The Hedge is an exhibition in the AirSpace Gallery window, which reflected where I’m at with my research after 3 months of being in Stoke. It combines my interests in working with the labeling of objects and the manipulations inherent to lens based media with new concerns that have arisen over the past few months.
Taking ideas of ‘the handmade’ and the disregarded properties of ‘things’, the work takes lifestyle programming and the competition and anxiety it induces as its starting point. In particular it looks at domestic gardening and the idiosyncratic ways in which we choose to manipulate the landscape to create our own personal paradises and showpieces.
Thoughts on the myths associated with bird feeding have also come into the work. Leaving bread out for birds is in fact not the generous gift we think it is. The image of Hovis scattered in the streets is familiar, we recognize its purpose, however, it is also a human intervention incongruent to its surroundings and habitual.
Holes In The Hedge is an amalgamation of various garden features that I have intervened with and manipulated through dyeing, making by hand (where it is normally deemed unnecessary) and shaped incongruent to their natural forms.
The work aimed to use the window format to explore the idea of a ‘garden’ as a place that can be communal or private, and the moments when the line between the two gets disrupted.
Since completing the work I am now reflecting on what was most successful and which threads of thought I now need to push further. Later on this week I will be starting on making some moulds and I think this will solidify ideas.
