Beyond The Ha-Ha

Cor well I can't believe I haven't been near this blog for almost a year.  So much has happened!  Since I finished college I have been pretty busy trying to learn how to be a proper artist ha.  I was awarded a three month graduate residency in the National Sculpture Factory here in Cork, which was really exciting.  I have just finished my stint there and am currently showing work in a group show called Beyond the Ha-Ha, so I thought I would share a little bit of my new work with you.

We had a wild winter, so the beaches were awash with all sorts of rubbish.  This was good news for a bin-raking beachcomber like me, so I filled my poor groaning car with sackfuls of crap and loads of interesting driftwood and hauled it all home to Tinderbox HQ, i.e our shed ;)

My good friend Amy and I spent about a week making loads of plaster moulds of beach stones so that I could make a whole heap of ceramic stones.  Some of them I saggar-fired, and some were made of terracotta and sawdust-fired, and I also discovered black porcelain for the first time which is gorgeous stuff to work with. I had fun trying to balance the stones of top of one another in  different formations;

One of my favourite finds was a stove top which was all rusted.  I fell in love with the shape of it and would have been quite happy to just show it on its own as I think it is beautiful, however it was further enhanced by the addition of some of the black and red stones:

One glorious evening I decided to take some of the new stuff down to the beach and do a photoshoot.  The light was wonderful and luckily I managed to get loads of pictures just before the tide came in oof that would have been a disaster ha ;)

I also wanted to get some driftwood in there, so I made a saggar-fired hanging piece with a particularly lovely flat piece:

Anyway the show is running until the 4th of May in the Wandesford Quay Gallery, so if any of you are around Cork please do pop in. There are also more ceramics on display, as well as paintings and sculpture.  In the meantime I shall be keeping busy with my first solo show in October (eek!) and trying to keep a lid on the panic ;) Your comments are, as always, most welcome ;)

Axeheads and Driftwood

Cor well I am limping to the end of this year...only one and a half weeks to go before assessments and I still have quite a few sculptures to make when the pieces come out of the kiln eek!  Still, I am really going to miss this college as it has been an amazing time, and I just hope I can find a way to keep making after I finish.

I thought I would share some of the pieces which will be going into the final exhibition ( I hope!)  There is still more to come but these are a few that are actually finished ahem...;)

I became somewhat fascinated by axeheads last term.  There is something lovely about their swooping shapes and once saggar-fired they look lovely with the silver birch.

This term took me on a hunt for more seasoned wood and I ended up on the beach hunting for driftwood.  I found some lovely pieces of wood and an old washed up frame, so I decided to try and do something with them.

A friend of mine also hauled these two pieces off the beach for me...they are massive and were very wet and soft, but I have scooped them out and dried them off and sanded them, so hopefully will be able to use them for something ;)

All the plastic I found on the beach will be made into wall pieces with the ceramic discs, and I have made hanging discs with ceramic versions of the plastic to highlight their colours.

And I made a couple more with some driftwood and shells...

And a dish, for good measure ;)

Anyhoo, hopefully it will all come together in the end and not look like a complete dog's dinner...there could well be more culling to come before the final cut, but I've enjoyed the journey I've been on this year and there are elements of the work here which I would like to expand upon in the future.

If any of you are in Cork and would be interested in coming to the exhibition, feel free, as it is free and there will also be free booze available ;) It is on the 7th June in the Crawford College of Art, and more information can be found here...

http://www.crawfordexhibitions.com/liminal2013/index.html

It'll be great craic ;)

Facebook Page

Well I have finally got round to making a Facebook page hallelujah! Not quite sure how I'm supposed to link it to this blog...there are probably far more professional ways of doing this! But if you fancy liking it then it would be much appreciated ;)

Tinderbox Ceramics Facebook Page

Ceramic Art London

Hmm so I was in London last weekend for Ceramic Art London at the Royal College of Art, which is always worth a visit as they have established names alongside newer emerging talent, and I always come home filled with inspiration and a renewed sense of enthusiasm and can't wait to get stuck back into clay again.  I took some photographs, which I don't think I was supposed to do so it probably makes me a bad person, but I wanted to share some of the highlights for me with you :)

There were lots of animals this year, however I especially love Stephanie Quayle's lifesize ones, which are sculpted from heavily grogged clay and bursting with animal quirkiness:

I also love Susan O'Byrne's patterned wildlife, which are made via a painstaking process of layers of porcelain clay stretched over a wire frame.  I also like the fact that she is also Scottish, so perhaps I am naturally biased ;)

Katharine Morling had some of her large sculptures on display too, and I love the narrative aspect of her work and the fact that the figures could have been drawn on paper, except they are lifesize and 3D:

Other highlights for me included wondrously slapdash colourful works by Elke Sada and Barry Stedman, and these beautiful vessels by Clare Conrad which evoke the kind of peeling paint and decaying surfaces I love:

Mette Maya Gregersen's work has a lovely fluid flow and movement to it, and is achieved by burning out wooden structures:

There were also gorgeous smoky vessels from the likes of Jack Docherty, Antonia Salmon and Joanna Still, stunning jewellery from Luca Tripaldi and a whole host of other wonderful works by artists too numerous to mention.  However, I would thoroughly recommend a visit if you ever get the chance.  I only went for one day this year, however I did manage to catch a talk by Adam Buick where he talked about a film he had made where he stuck one of his unfired moon jars on top of a hillside in Wales and photographed it every 33 seconds for 10 days.  The pot slowly weathered away under the onslaught of the elements, and the resulting film is quite beautiful.  Entitled Earth to Earth, here is a link to a clip of it:

Adam Buick Earth to Earth

Anyhoo thank you for reading this, and thank you to all the artists who were exhibiting for their inspirational work.  Keep it coming ;)

Plastic Soup

Hmm so I have been woefully neglecting this blog lately as have been bogged down with thesis, work and college stuff and sometimes it doesn't seem to matter how fast you go you never seem to be able to catch up.  However, I thought I could share some of the stuff I've been working on lately with you.  I have been indulging in a spot of beachcombing, again, recently and I have been horrified by the amount of plastic to be found.  The beaches in East Cork are covered in the stuff.  The plastic lies like bright pops of colour amongst the seaweed, bottles, old ropes and fishing nets that also litter our beaches.  They are sea-worn and very smooth, and strangely beautiful even though the presence of it in such large amounts is extremely disturbing.

Whilst googling the possible causes of all this plastic, I came across this guy Jurga Rakau, who has recently spent six months photographing plastic on Irish beaches that apparantly originates from all the immense masses of crap floating around our oceans. (Source)

I have started making pieces which I hope will bring some attention to how shocking the existence of all this plastic is.  They are not finished yet, but I think I am going to suspend some of them in a Calderesque manner, and some I will make into wall pieces.  In the meantime, every time I go to the beach now I take a big sack which I stuff with as much plastic and faded old bleach bottles as I can, and I take them home and recycle them.  It's not much, but it feels like a start ;)