Monthly Archives: July 2017

Sarah Jenkins

By richardhatfield | Published July 31, 2017

Sarah Jenkins has been making ceramics for more than 30 years and  is based in a north Essex village where her direct connection to the landscape is very important to her work.

I feel I am on a search, my quarry is elusive, intuition is more helpful in this territory than analysis.
A key influence is the land around where I live, where I was born, to which I feel attached. However, although ever-present, sometimes this aspect can be more subliminal or oblique. Ceramics is my dominant medium. I do paint sometimes, and I have recently completed the first of a series of bronzes.

Her journey has been unconventional, and includes: leaving her Fine Art degree, a long period working as a plasterer in the building trade, adult-education classes at Morley College, clay work with people with mental health problems, a lot of experimentation, including building more than one studio and raku kilns, and a sabbatical in a Cape Town ceramic studio.

Her ceramic work is always hand built and fired several times. She’s currently using simple slips and oxides with scant use of glaze.

 

 

Dynamic Monchrome Design

By richardhatfield | Published July 28, 2017

Timney Fowler Designs from a private collection

Timney Fowler is a brand of postmodern design ranging from fashion to interiors created by Sue Timney and Grahame Fowler after they met at the RCA in 1979. They established the brand in Japan where they worked with Yohji Yamamoto and Issey Miyake. In 1983 they set up a shop and studio in Portobello Green, and a couple of years later moved to the King’s Road. This exhibition focuses on the designs from the early 1980s until Grahame Fowler left the business in 2001.

Findings

By richardhatfield | Published July 20, 2017

Findings

An exhibition by Alice Fox

Alice Fox presents a collection of Findings; objects that respond to places and landscapes where she has walked. The objects, both altered found items and constructed forms, incorporate hand stitch, weave, natural staining and gathered materials.

The title Findings refers to two different definitions: The action of finding someone or something; and information discovered as the result of an inquiry or investigation.

Alice’s practice brings together recording, collecting and interaction with the landscape. She is fascinated by the detail of organic things and her thoughtful work celebrates and carries an essence of what she experiences in the natural world. Her background in physical geography and nature conservation underpins her artistic practice.

Alice works with natural fibres and gathered materials, employing natural dye techniques, stitch and weave in different combinations to create surfaces and structures. Found items, their identity often a mystery because of the action of the elements, form the focus of Alice’s response to a landscape. By engaging closely with the materials that she finds, manipulating them and experimenting, following a line of enquiry, Alice learns about their properties, boundaries and possibilities. She uses found objects to make marks, allowing them to stain the fibres and stitches that she surrounds them with. This becomes a collaborative process between object and artist. Alice presents her Findings with reference to traditional ways of displaying natural history collections. A publication to accompany the exhibition was published in October 2016.

Alice is author of Natural processes in Textile Art (Batsford, 2015), which promotes a way of working creatively with what is close at hand and making creative responses that are in tune with natural processes. Alice lives and works in West Yorkshire. She lectures and teaches regularly and is a member of the Textile Study Group and the Society of Designer Craftsmen.

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