about
me
I live and work in Grantchester near Cambridge
- my workshop is the former village cricket pavilion. My most
familiar material is clay and my ceramic work has been widely
shown in Britain and in Canada, Croatia, France, Germany, Netherlands,
Sweden, Switzerland, Taiwan and USA.
A book about my pots, coming
round again (1998), designed in collaboration with
my nephew, Webster Wickham, contains essays which call my ceramic
work ‘odd...yet enjoyable, exhilarating, and contemplative’
(Gillian Beer), ‘more anarchic and rougher’ (Tanya
Harrod) and ‘a lyrical sabotage of the conventional’
(Edmund de Waal).
As a young
woman I studied history at Oxford University and worked as an
academic, a social worker and a teacher before I started going
to pottery evening classes in the mid seventies. In place of an
art school training I taught on the legendary Open University
course Art and Environment. I have been a feminist
since the time when it was called being a member of the Women's
Liberation Movement and a peace protester since the Aldermarston
Marches and Greenham Common. |
|
Inspired
in part by the Women’s Peace Camp at Greenham, I have increasingly
moved aside from making finished objects and into work where the
passage of time, the live process, is a key element. (For more about
this aspect of my work see imagined
corners and material
woman sections of the site.)
Tender, direct, resilient, with a thin skin: that is how I think
my work may touch you. To sustain working in this way means my remaining
open to the emotions and sensations of an ordinary life. I keep
slipping between categories - life, art, therapy, play, ritual -
and find that I’m usually in more than one at a time, and
with something up my sleeve!
My work can be seen in the following Public collections:
Victoria and Albert Museum London Fitzwilliam Museum
Cambridge University of Wales at Aberystwyth
Kunstmuseum Hamburg Germany Leeds City Art Gallery
Cleveland Studio Pottery Collection Bolton City Art
Gallery Buckinghamshire Museum Dean Clough
Contemporary Art Halifax Hawkes Bay Museum New Zealand
Deidesheim Ceramics Museum Germany Paisley Museum
Aberdeen Art Gallery BA at Gatwick |
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