Paint & Clay

Exhibition 15th-27th November 2022
Opening Event Thursday 17th Nov 6-8pm
Artist talks 19th, 22nd, 24th, 26th November 1-2pm
For a full list of the artist talks click here

Late shopping Friday 25th Nov until 7.30pm

For enquiries about Paint & Clay please call Lynn 07855 753431

Gallery Open:
Daily 11-16.30pm
except Monday

The Exhibitors:

SHEENA BOND (www.sheenabond.co.uk, @sheenabondceramics) Sheena enjoys wheel throwing, often incorporating coil building within the pieces she creates. The Haar series of bowls is inspired by the sea and coastal conditions.  They are thrown or coiled using heavily grogged clays, which creates texture and colour variations beneath the glazes, much like the constant changes of sea state. The bowls are glazed to reflect the mood of the sea; swirling waters, misty visibility and sometimes darker areas representing some of the challenges experienced when sailing.

HARRIET BONE (@daer.bone) Is one of the artists who will be giving a talk. Currently her work is revolving around the issue of how to accurately and respectfully depict personal tragedy and complex relationships, along with the ideas of how people live with nuanced trauma in their daily lives. Her practice is singular in its pursuit of depicting in her own visual and symbolic language, topics, and events, that she feels she has the breadth of understanding to render into paint. Her medium is as important to her as her concepts; she has a long-standing relationship to paint and its materiality. Her view of the world and its concepts is a detailed and intuitive one; as such she finds that paint allows her to find it on canvas in a much more successful way than other mediums can. She loves the physicality of painting: the object and the real. As a member of “generation Z” she finds that she’s spent a lot of her time, in education or leisure, with the screen and so painting pulls her back into a space that she feels is important for her to inhabit. Her work is concerned with the intimate lives of people around her and of herself. She focuses on the nuances of interpersonal relationships and experiences of her subjects, coupled with everyday life and living.

LAURA BROWNE (www.laurabrownedesign.com  @laurabrownedesign) Laura Browne is an Illustrator and Surface pattern designer, specialising in hand drawn designs inspired by botanical art and natural themes. Laura’s compositions are made up of a stream of consciousness, weaving together shapes and patterns informed by observation. Her detailed drawings invite the viewer to look more closely, allowing time to pause and connect with the natural word, contemplate its beauty, diversity and fragility, by considering their place within it. Working in fine detail is a slow process which allows time for creativity, reflection and introspection.

WENDY BRENAN Wendy is a studio potter making functional, thrown and hand-built pots. She has been particularly inspired by ‘waves’ stating that the whole universe is made up from waves whether gravitational, sound, light or merely from Hayling and Southsea beaches!

LOLA CLAEYS BOUUAERT (@lolacbceramics; www.lola-claeys-bouuaert.com) Lola trained as an architect in Belgium and started working with clay in Beirut, Lebanon 15 years ago. She now works from her studio in the Milland Valley in West Sussex. Most of her ceramic pieces are hand-built. Some are burnished several times before bisque firing, then smoke-fired overnight in wood shavings, sawdust and other natural materials, leaving imprints of wild plants. The pieces are cleaned and polished with a protective wax. Other pieces are raku-fired. Both techniques lead to surprising and unpredictable results. Each piece is unique, tactile, retaining the scent and patina of wood smoke. 

KEVIN DEAN ( www.kevindean.co.uk, @KevinJdeano, FB Kevin Dean) A highly versatile artist, Kevin has illustrated numerous books, designed textiles and ceramics, along with various public art projects. He is also the designer of much of the marble decoration at The Sheikh Zayed Grand Mosque, Abu Dhabi, which has also led to other notable commissions in the region. Trained at the Royal College of Art Kevin works in watercolour and printmaking, he is particularly interested in working directly from life, often in quite challenging environments, from rainforests in Borneo and Venezuela to huge street demonstrations in London. Kevin has exhibited at galleries around the UK and abroad and has taken part in a couple of previous shows at The Jack House Gallery. 

SANDIE DIXON Her functional earthenware pots are thrown on the wheel and then decorated with coloured slips before a final firing with a clear glaze. Summer sailing along the south coast provides the inspiration for her lively and lighthearted designs which feature quaysides, boats, fish, and sea birds.

NEAL GRIFFIN His passion for clay began in 2017 when he was able to join a local pottery group. Since then he has been able to experiment and develop his work drawing inspiration from his love of nature and the natural world. He creates highly detailed sculptures of animals and birds as well as throwing and hand building pieces. 

GILLIAN HAWKINS (www.gillianhawkins.co.uk www.artspace.co.uk) Gillian is one of the artists who will be giving a talk. She is a painter working on canvas and on paper. Her work is abstract but with a strong narrative element and interrogates the emotions around the domestic space to which we can relate. These may be intrinsic to the space itself or reflections of situations outside and bearing down upon it. On canvas she works in oil (loving the colour and texture of the paint as well as the time which it gives to dialogue with the work) often using oil bars to draw on the surface of the painting to increase urgency and contrast with more formal areas of painting. She also works on paper, starting off with a dip pen and a less uniform line, using ink, watercolour and soft pastel. The colours in pastel are vibrant and become part of the narrative of the work itself reflecting an emotional response.

NIGEL HOBBS (www.nigelhobbsceramics.co.uk) Nigel Hobbs is one of the artists who will be giving a talk. He has been a potter for over 40 years training, initially, at Farnham Art School – now University for the Creative Arts. Whilst producing some glazed stoneware fired work, he now mainly specialises in Raku fired pieces. Raku firing is a technique, developed initially in Japan, which involves heating the work in a kiln to a temperature of around 1000˚C which melts the specifically designed glazes, after which the very hot work is taken out of the kiln and reduced in a lidded container of sawdust, or other combustible material, before quenching in water. This crazes the glaze and blackens the unglazed areas creating exciting and unpredictable results. Finishes other than glaze involve decorating burnished work with horse hair, feathers etc., creating fine random patterns.

SUE KELLY Sue has a background in Fine Art, but she currently works mostly in ceramics. She finds the tactile qualities of clay absorbing. It’s ability to be stretched, carved, cracked and eroded reflects her interest in the forces that create and shape our landscapes, both from natural elements and human endeavour. Sue is particularly drawn to lines and textures that define the contours of the land, but also close-up detail. She is fascinated with how patterns and textures of the small scale are reflected in the larger landscape.

ELLA KILGOUR Ella Kilgour is a painter and portrait artist, working in Southsea. Self taught,  she uses a lively mix of contemporary and classical themes and techniques. Her paintings are about the fuzzy edge between Old Worlds and New Worlds, the blurry edge between real and imagined. ' I am drawn to paint moments or objects which I find beautiful, touching or funny. There is a push and pull at the core of my painting - between the discipline of accuracy and the looseness of energy and feeling. For me, it's the tension between the two that makes a successful painting.'

 COLIN MERRIN Colin will be giving an artist talk & has exhibited throughout the UK and Europe in numerous solo and group exhibitions since 1981 and has work in private collections including the royal collection and the British Museum. He was elected to the Royal Watercolour Society in 2009. The human form has dominated his work for the past few years. He relies largely on a process that applies an unplanned and intuitive method of painting which embraces absurdity as an important factor. Although this approach is more common among abstract artists, his iconography is fundamentally figurative. Collage and text are integrated into the imagery that can enable or even inhibit meaning. His paintings reference human behaviour and current events and also question the notion of meaning as a fixed or even rational idea.

MARGARET NEWTON (margaret.ntn@btinternet.com) Margaret makes ceramic birds and creatures. Her sculptures are given a smoke-firing. This creates a palette of black/grey/white marks achieved by burnishing the sculptures then kiln-firing them to 1000oc.  After this she paints on a coarse clay to resist the black smoke of the smoke-firing or leave areas to become black. When cool, this layer is peeled off and the marks revealed.  She also makes high-fired stoneware sculptures for indoors or outdoors. 

LYNN NICHOLLS (@southseamudlark) Lynn makes functional earthenware which is either thrown or slab built. She particularly enjoys exploring the surface decoration through pattern, layering of glazes, sgraffitto and loose line work. Although Lynn may work in a series, each piece is unique and the surface approached in a similar way to a painter working on a canvas. For this exhibition Lynn has focused on humorous portraits.

ANTON PAGE will be giving an artist talk. As a largely self-taught potter Anton started by making fairly traditional practical pieces such as mugs, jugs and piggy banks. Although there is still space for traditional glazed ware his work has evolved to include more sculptural pieces, not necessarily functional, but hopefully something that can be seen as 3-dimensional art and the bigger the better! His pots are heavily influenced by traditional unglazed pottery, such as storage jars, from around the world (Pompeii, Zimbabwe, Hong Kong) and also by the many standing stones found in the UK. The overall feel he is trying to achieve is “earthy, rustic and textured”. For the more sculptural pieces Anton tends not to use conventional glazes but prefers the raw surface of heavily grogged, gritty clays such as crank or raku. These are then finished with oxides, wood ash, metal powders and even road salt to add to the rough-hewn weathered appearance. Occasionally the finished pots may get a splash of glaze or the addition of a complementary material such as coloured glass or gold leaf to give the pot a lift and make a real statement piece. antonpage1@outlook.com

VASU REDDY (@vasureddyceramics; www.potsandbellies.co.uk) Vasu Reddy has been working to capture in clay, the textures of broken surfaces – both natural, as in cracked earth and weathered rocks and manmade, as in broken dwellings. She is inspired by patterns which show intriguing violations. She is mainly a thrower but is venturing (with heart in mouth) into hand-building and sculpture. Much of her work reveals influences from her childhood in India. It is perhaps not surprising that something of the feeling of its loss is reflected in her work. She likes the raw feel of unglazed work and the magic of ash glazes.

SUE ROBBINS (#suzannahrobbins) Relatively new to ceramics, Sue is passionate about exploring and experimenting with both thrown and hand-built forms. Working mainly in stoneware she explores texture and form to make both functional and decorative items. Occasionally, working with porcelain gives her an opportunity to work with the more delicate qualities it offers. Recent experiments with multi layered glazes have enabled her to achieve surfaces which reflect the world around us, natural elements such as the sea and coastal rocks. 

HELEN SCRIBBANS  Helen will be giving an artist talk. She makes vessels and quirky sculptural pieces using a combination of hand-building techniques such as slabs, coils and pinch pots. Her work is decorated using Raku glazes; Raku is a traditional Japanese technique where the piece is removed from the kiln when the glaze is molten. The process is unpredictable and difficult to control adding to the excitement and individuality of the work.

ADRIENNE SHIELDS Adrienne Shields makes sculptures and clay works that are bright and fun. Living by the sea influences her work. Clay is coloured with slips, oxides and underglaze colours then fired to earthenware temperatures. Each piece is individually made.

NICK TAYLOR (www.willowbed-design.co.uk) Nick works exclusively in stoneware and typically hand build from textured slabs. He likes the tension generated between alternating ‘natural’ and ‘man-made’ motifs. The slab-building process lends itself especially well to the garden lanterns, bonsai pots, boxes and ornamental jugs that he makes. He also experiments with techniques such as clay sculpture and slip cast forms derived from his own ‘CAD’ designs. Recent sculptures have included caricatures of various prominent politicians and some of these pieces have an interactive element to them. The techniques of CAD and 3D printing are used to create many of the texture rollers and stamps used in his slab-based work. Celadon and other glazes that lend themselves to breaking over the textured surfaces are used to accentuate the decorative elements of the forms.

JOHANNA TRICKLEBANK Jo will be giving an artist talk. After completing a Diploma in ceramics at The City Lit institute in London Jo has spent the last 20 years working with this amazing material – clay. She tries to use it as an artist uses paint, to create surface qualities on vessels and wall pieces that are inspired by nature in its most rugged form, hopefully going some way to expressing its power and beauty .

CHRIS N WOOD (www.chriswoodartist.com, www.artspace.co.uk, #chrisnwoodartist) Chris Wood will be giving an artist talk. A highly skilled traditional fine artist, his work is informed by meticulous attention to detail. Before embarking on a career as a painter/printmaker he worked in London as an illustrator, designer and educator. He has exhibited widely and has work in many worldwide collections. He is best known for capturing the illusion of water with its fleeting aspects of form, light and motion. Chris is no stranger to The Jack House Gallery, exhibiting over the years - notably alongside, the late Edward Beale in July 2016. Since lockdown, Chris has concentrated on a new series of autobiographical "psycho-geographical seascapes".