PROJECTS
Elsie’s Family Quilt
. Materials: Slab made stoneware glazed then photographic decals fired into glaze surface
Dimensions: 104cm x 74cm
Elsie’s Family Quilt
is very personal to me. It wasn’t until I was looking at some old family photos that I noticed that in many of them my relatives were wearing clothes made by members of my family. Making isn’t the prerogative of the women in the family, my youngest brother used to weave and one of my uncles used to make some of my auntie’s dresses. My uncle had previously been a sheet metal worker, and he said that dressmaking followed the same principles, just a different material.
Both my Grandma Elsie and my mother have been quilt makers and I decided to make a version using the same principals but made in clay. My piece also patchworks together the family skills of knitting, sewing, weaving and ceramics, skills separate to the individual but joined together as a family.
The images used show pieces of textile work merged into images of family members hopefully depicting how craft is integral to them. Quilt pieces represent sections of knitting or pieces of material.
I would like to think that viewers would see in my work a resonance in their own memory which is akin to mine and that together it would become part of a collective memory, or even a quilted memory.
Reflective Buildings
. Materials: Slab built ceramic "buildings" made using a variety of clays amd slips laminated slashed and stretched
Artists Statement
This work is a reaction to the city environment. I am particularly interested in glass clad multistorey buildings which provide a canvas onto which images of other buildings can be projected in the form of distorted reflections. Sometimes it is difficult to differentiate the real from the reflected and sometimes the reflections are so distorted they have an otherworldly appearance. I hope with my ceramic structures to depict the cityscape in both a reflected and a reflective perspective.
The Abandoned Chair
Materials:
Ceramic chair seat, found chair frame, paving slab and metal rod
Artists Statement
The abandoned chair is showing its age. It has a history, some of which is evident in its condition. It is hoped that the viewer when studying the piece will find that it evokes more than it describes and be able to reinterpret it from a different perspective. By using the medium of clay, with its unusual qualities of fragility and permanence, it is possible to capture the elusiveness of memory. Time is trapped. The piece is a ceramic still in the life history of the chair seat, a permanent representation of memory. The viewer is left to fill in its back story.
Treasure Box
Wedding Present
Love seemed to be in the air in 2012 and as a result there were quite a few weddings to go to. I wanted to make a wedding present that would be unique to the happy couple and would be a keepsake of their wedding day.
I had been making small trinket boxes with imprinted patterned surfaces and decided that a larger version about the size of a shoebox could be used as a "treasure box" for storage of special personal items and ephemera. To personalize the box I added a plaque with the couples initials intertwined and the date of their wedding.
