TANGIBLES

New Work by Martin Pearce: Paul Wearing: Rachel Wood
10th August - 2nd September 2017

Contemporary Ceramics Centre, 63 Great Russell Street,
Bloomsbury, London, WC1B 3BF.

This August, The Contemporary Ceramics Centre presents TANGIBLES - a showcase of the extensive talents of three established UK ceramists. Using a muted palette of mineral colours these new works co-exist easily, reflecting the power of nature, the elemental forces of sea and earth, and the rugged texture of rural landscapes.   

The work is highly textured, with tactile and energetic surfaces that reflect the ceramicists’ response to extreme environments. Non-figurative in nature, the pieces present many points of reference – perhaps molecular or topographical.
This is an exhibition that reveals an energetic earthiness that can be achieved with the material.

The biomorphic and weighty forms by Martin Pearce enclose empty space and volume to a consistently dramatic effect, conveying a quiet sense of depth and ease, a sense of the ancient and mysterious. These substantial forms are built rather than thrown, using coils, strips, slips and modified glazes, and their bold presence exudes a definite and hard-to-ignore power, like long-lost chunks of some ancient monolith.

 Paul Wearing’s ceramic vessels with their highly tactile glazed surfaces, are a result of the textures that manifest naturally during the making process, added to and completed by alchemical developments within the kiln. The rough bands of colour on his vases, pots and ellipses suggest unsettled seascapes, desolate rural tracts, and stormy skies. The pieces provoke a dialogue between the hand-made and natural manifestations of our landscape.

Via a combination of throwing and hand building techniques, Rachel Wood produces vases and bowls that evoke weather-blown seascapes and thundery horizons. Their surfaces are scratched and indented with tool and finger marks, then swathed with layers of slips and glazes, and etched with fissures and cracks caused by the firing, all of which combine to form each pot’s unique character.

Contemporary Ceramics Centre