Category Archives: Blog

Will You Still Love Me?

There is a move afoot to go and live in Cornwall properly this summer.  I am extremely excited about this – I have handed in my notice for my teaching post and, whist I will miss the lovely children that I teach 3 days per week, I am very excited about the future . . . . .

Well, I think I am!  I love Cornwall.  It is, to all intents and purposes, my home anyway and the Roseland Peninsular is calling me in no uncertain terms.

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The Roseland Peninsular is calling me.

But, and it is a very big but, what will happen to my ceramics?

 

Eventually I will have a studio in St Mawes.  I have the planning permission for it, it will be easy to reach whenever I want to pop in for a few hours or just for 10 minutes to check on the kiln, I wont have to drive through the London traffic taking up to an hour to go about 6 miles, I can sip my coffee gazing at the weather coming in over the Lizard.  What’s not to like?

Absolutely nothing!  Except, it is a risk isn’t it – this jumping off the rat race.  Wimbledon offers me so much.  It may cost a bit but it gives me easy access to a fabulous customer base without whom I would have stopped playing with clay long ago.  The twice yearly Open Studios, the next one of which is coming up in May, regularly sees 4-5 thousand people come through the doors.  The feedback which they provide on the work they see in your studio is invaluable and the purchases that they make are extremely affirming of the effort which one puts in for the rest of the year.  In addition,  when the feeling leaves me and I don’t know what to do, there is always the kettle.

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Wimbledon Artists Studios gives me so much of what I need as an artist.

You can usually find someone to bounce and idea off, share a moment of frustration with or simply ask how they are doing.  Then off you go, back to work feeling a release from the doubt or what ever was bugging you.  In addition to that, the is Klay.  Our new baby is growing fast.

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Klay is doing so well.
It has done so well in the short time that it has been in operation that the 12 of us had a long and deep discussion this week about what happens when we get to the end of our three months popping up in Camden.  I want to be a part of this project.  I believe that it has a great deal of mileage and, judging by the response that we are getting from our customers and also from Camden itself (whose generosity allowed us to get up and popping in the first place), I am not alone in this belief.

 

It seems to me that I ma going to need to find some way of having it all!

Just An Ordinary Market Town

Sleaford: a market town on the edge of the Lincolnshire fens;somwhere between Grantham, Boston and Lincoln with a population of about 18,000 and, from my limited experience, the worst traffic system in UK!

Important fact: Sleaford is now the home of the National Centre for Craft and Design within an old seed factory on Navigation Wharf.

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NCCD, Sleaford.
It is this fact that meant I was in Sleaford on Friday.  I have the good fortune to have been selected by the Design Factory,which is based in the building, as one of their Emerging Makers.  On Friday I made the trip to visit the centre and to chat about the direction in which my work is going.  It was extremely helpful to be able to voice some of my ideas and to have feedback on how things are developing – much food for thought!  It was also good to look in their shop and to see the work of other artists, Kate Welton for example, whom I had the pleasure of exhibiting alongside at Great Northern Contemporary Crafts Fair, and who is also an Emerging Maker.

 

I had no idea that this was such an impressive set up.  In addition to the shop there is a lovely looking café, several workshop spaces and a number of fabulous exhibition spaces which, coincidentally, currently comprise two ceramics exhibitions.  Alphabet Aerobics by Anton Alvarez challenges the preconceptions of making, craft and design. Alvarez is not a ceramic artist but here he is making use of clay to explore and  redefine the role of the artist in the creative process. The results are strangely beautiful and the space they are currently occupying only serves to enhance this.

Up on the top floor in Sleaford is the work of Kathryn Parsons.  151228-found-in-the-woodlands-1med-307x400[1]Her exhibition, Found in the Field is inspired by the poems of John Clare and comprises tiny, exquisite porcelain works.  I could have spent hours in their company!

So come on, friends, the deep recesses of Lincolnshire are certainly worthy of a trip, but might I suggest that you leave your car at home and go by train!