New work

 I have updated my website at last.  clothandclay.co.uk

The composite picture which is on the homepage is not new work, of course, but nevertheless it is a new picture and I hope conveys the several directions in which my work is going.
I have simplified the website greatly to reflect the simpler life I now have; the previous site was written ten years ago and updates were mostly additions rather then reductions.

I do have a mailing list, which these days is by email only.  If you are not on the mailing list and would like to be, please email me and I will add you.  I don't send out mails very often; they are more occasional newsletters, but I do send out to notify you of events such as exhibitions and open studios.  I have been quiet with my work lately, as most of us have with the pandemic, but hope to be a little noisier in future!

I'm taking part in a group exhibition in Lower Slaughter 20th - 26th April so am now busy making some new work.  The updated website was part one of that.  I'll be showing textiles, silver, other jewellery and greetings cards and am now working on new pieces within those categories.  More details will follow, on my website.

In other news, completion on my new house was quicker than expected but the work will take much longer, partly because builders are booked up until next year.  However, the house is still an exciting new project for me.  Planning with the architects, showing friends and relatives round the existing house and getting started on clearing unwanted trees from a boundary wall are the current stages.

I feel energised by needing to make new work to a deadline.  

Is it spring yet?

I'd like to start by saying that I certainly do believe in climate change.  What is happening to the sea, for instance, and the melting icecaps just can't be denied.  However, and this may be a little controversial, I don't believe that any patch of unusual weather is a sign of climate change.  We've always had it in this country.

In February we had some exceptionally mild weather, but it's not by any means a first.  I remember the odd week in February where I sat in my attic studio with the window open all day.  I can't tell you what years that happened in because they only happen occasionally, but they do happen.  Then we get the rest of winter, which is what we're getting now.

Mike3 used to say, "He who celebrates the first warm day as the start of spring gets the longest spring but he who waits till the last frost gets the longest winter."  I like that.  So I think spring has begun, but slowly.  Things in my garden think so too.  Some of them like this aubretia, have never totally stopped blooming, even in the snow, and now are really starting to come into their own.

Meanwhile, I've been on antidepressants for more than five weeks and I'm pleased to say that I'm feeling a great deal different.  You're not supposed to notice any improvement for a couple of weeks at least but I started to feel better after about four days.  It's difficult to describe but I just knew I had feelings that had been absent for a while. 

It wasn't plain sailing.  I wasn't warned about the possible anxiety as a side-effect and it was most unpleasant.  Luckily for me it wore off after a couple of weeks, which it does for most people though not all.  And then I was back to being myself.

I think I'd been depressed for longer than I had thought at first.  Life things get in the way which can be blamed for how you feel, but now I am doing and thinking things that I'm aware I wouldn't have done in the last six months or so.  It creeps up on you.

What I don't mean is that everything in the garden is rosy.  I'm not on cloud nine or even cloud six.  Life is what it should be if your brain isn't warping it, in other words there are good and bad days, good and bad things happen, and last Friday at a friends drop-in-for-tea afternoon nobody talked about Brexit at all.


At the moment I'm particularly enjoying this tall euphorbia.  Its vibrant green flowers are very long-lasting and have brightened up my garden for a couple of months.  In the background in a tub you can see a shorter euphorbia with pale leaves but still fairly bright flowers.  It's proved to be an ideal tub plant.

PS, there's still another week of Another Beastly Art Exhibition at Nature In Art, from tomorrow till Sunday.

The long view

We're often encouraged to 'seize the day' and 'live in the present' and I'm in favour of both.  Thinking of the phrase reminds me that many years ago I had a commission from a C of E vicar, (not sure why it feels relevant, but somehow the choice seemed surprising at the time) to make a hanging to commemmorate the birth of his granddaughter.  Many of my pieces being fishy in those days he wanted "Carpe Diem" with a carp-like fish (and name and birth dates).  He was clearly proud of the pun and actually I liked it too.  I've probably taken more notice of the sentiment since then.

I think it often doesn't look like this to other people, though, because of my tendency to plan.  I love to plan.  I like having things I know about in advance to savour before they happen and I think I enjoy them all the more.  There is a risk of disappointment, of course, if things don't go to plan, but I am usually either modest in my expectations or perhaps just lucky that plans often do work out for me.

Work plans and goals in particular nearly always do work out.  I think this is because I only set achievable goals, though I admit that sometimes they are only barely achieveable and then take a lot of commitment to achieve.  A friend once described me as "single minded" about my work.  It turns out that working part time doesn't make any difference in this regard: I still feel pretty single minded about what I want to achieve and, if necessary, I still put work first.

My work goals are nearly all taking the long view.  There are reasons for this.  Exhibitions and other events need to be booked well in advance.  I suppose you could ignore this and still make work for them at the last minute, but I don't.  I like to have some idea of the mix of work I want available when the time comes.  The other, main, reason for taking the long view is my pottery work schedule, which I've written about before.  What this means is that since I returned to work in the pottery I have in mind new work for the November exhibition and for Christmas sales, and those are what I am working on now.  Things I made a couple of weeks ago won't be finished until possibly October if they are going to be decorated with lustre.   I am continuing with most of my usual ranges but also branching out and making just a few here and there of new shapes.  You'll have seen the new cake plates and they're on sale now.  The others, though, are under wraps until later in the year.

And in a funny sort of way all this still is seizing the day.  I ask myself what I would most like to be doing today and try to do it.  Most days what I want to do is to work towards a plan or two and that's what makes me happy.

Exhibition news

Once again I'm exhibiting at The Cotswold Craftsmen Gallery, in an exhibition called, imaginatively, "CLOTH and CLAY".  It's a smallish exhibition space - what you see here is most of my exhibition - but it really suits my work.  I can display the complete mixture of what I make in a way which allows all the component elements of my artwork - ceramics, pictures, scarves, accessories and cards - to come together in a single whole.

Life is a bit difficult and stressful at the moment (hence even less blogging than usual, apologies) so I'm particularly pleased to have put together an exhibition I'm proud of.  I know most people reading this blog live too far away to visit, but don't forget you can always contact me if you want to know more about anything you see in these photos.

Exhibition news

I hope lots of you will be able to visit the exhibition.  I'm really pleased to be exhibiting with these other artists and to be working to a different theme.  As there are six of us, I will be selecting work - old and new- which resonates more particularly with the theme of "Grounded". 

Look out for some different coloured spotty mugs!  There is a collection of green and brown themed spotty mugs which are for the moment "limited edition" in number, though if they prove popular I may make more of them.  And there will be .....  well, you'll have to come to the exhibition to find out what else I'm making .....


On a different subject, as an update, I'm delighted to say that I raised £270 for ShelterBox with my wallhanging raffle.  The hanging was one by a customer who came to my stall at Stroud Farmers Market.  Thank you to all who donated.

Tiny Textiles Treats

... are here at last.  Each one is approx 4" (10cms) square and they cost between £8.50 and £14.00.  Some are silk-painted with a little stitch detail, some are machine embroidered appliqué.

The mini-pics will have their first outing next Wednesday - (gulp!) - when Another Beastly Art Exhibition opens in Cheltenham.  Exactly what other work will be ready to exhibit then remains to be seen.  I am working towards a lustre firing so hope for exciting new pots, but I also have new canvasses to frame, posters, price labels and notices to print and everything to pack up, all by Tuesday afternoon.  So what am I doing faffing about making group photos and blogging ? .......

Photos

Well, you can't say this post doesn't do what it says on the tin.

It's remarkably warm for the time of year, so we went for a little wander by the canal.  There are things in flower but I hadn't ever noticed before that they are all white.  I know the first flowers of the year are often yellow but had never noticed before that there were so many white things.

One photo is of course not flowers, but the sunlight on the leaves seemed to go with the general theme.

This blog needs to get back to its roots, I think.  I used to post photos or general news about our lives but then the blog got rather work-oriented.  People seem interested in that but increasingly there is less to say about it.  This is partly because I'm just not able to do the work I want to do.  Sciatica took care of a large part of the year.  It's mostly gone.  However, I now have a recurring rib injury - something I did when falling over last October which has obviously not healed properly.  Not sure what yet, but that doesn't actually make any difference to the fact that I can't make pots.

Stock is low, Another Beastly Art Exhibition is coming up in a few weeks and I wanted to make new ceramic work for that.  But it can't be helped.  I know rib injuries just take time.

In the mean time there is plenty else that needs doing, finishing off, labelling and packing all the textiles work I did while we were in France. 

In other news ...

I made my Christmas cake yesterday.  Regular readers may remember last year when the mice not only ate a lot of the stored cake but made their nest in it and as a final insult, left behind some bits of mortar and an old screw.  I have bought a new plastic cake box and this year's cake is now in it.  Because of the rib injury, I thought it wise not to lift the cake-in-a-box up onto a shelf above my head, so I asked M to do it.  When I asked him to put the box on the mouse shelf, he knew exactly what I meant.  The mouse shelf it shall ever be, then.

Hidden tasks

Another Beastly Art Exhibition is on its way, but not closely enough yet for publicity images, Facebook events or web pages.  Nevertheless, much of the work I've been doing over the past couple of months is in preparation for the exhibition in the middle of November.  No pots while I'm in France, but textiles work, cards and earrings can all be made here and the work you see at an exhibition has often been made months ahead, as I think I've mentioned here before.

As I was working away yesterday, I was aware that I'd achieved quite a bit but at the same time had nothing new to show for it and began to think about how much of not only putting on an exhibition but generally running an arts/crafts business consists of hidden tasks.  I've already created a slideshow which shows many of the hidden tasks which go into making a mug.  I sometimes have it running at exhibitions but if you've never seen it, you can also see it here on my website. 

Recently I've been meaning to tweet more than I have been doing as I realise my focus has been much more on Facebook and that this isn't fair to those who prefer Twitter.  I announced on Twitter that I would treat the beginning of September as a new year, since it heralds a new academic year, and therefore my new year's resolution was to tweet more often and more interestingly.

Ah.  You see what I did there?  Placed my own petard roundly centre stage and hoist myself on it.

Luckily a solution sprang to mind:  tweets about individual hidden tasks.  There are so many of them.  Just today I've done about five of them already.  I shall probably select the tasks somewhat randomly although they may appear in related clutches.

If you are on Twitter but not yet following me, then this is the chance you've been waiting for.  There's a link to my Twitter page just over there on the right of this piece.

To kick things off, today's hidden task is reproduced here:

#hiddentask no 1: design sticky label for packaging for new product and print out a sheet of them.

Hen Portraits

Well, ok, just one Hen Portrait.  There are seven of them, though, and you'll have to come to Another Beastly Art Exhibition to see the rest.  I'm rather pleased with them.  They were somewhat fiddly - the white section in the middle is 6cms square - and done by silk painting and free machine embroidery.  But they're rather fun, I think.

It's a funny time of year ...

... to be preparing for a big exhibition, but I am.  Followers will be familiar with Another Beastly Art Exhibition but I should probably explain briefly to new readers (hoping there are some!) that Another Beastly Art Exhibition has been a group event running first annually and now occasionally since 1999 involving me, jeweller Hazel Morris (Arkane Jewellery) and painter and printmaker Nat Morley.  We used to exhibit in Painswick but for various reasons (including the obvious one of venues becoming unavailable) we won't be there again. 

This year we're really excited to be exhibiting at Nature In Art, a fabulous museum and art gallery dedicated entirely to ... well, work it out.  They have permanent exhibits, big touring exhibitions and other events, of which Another Beastly Art Exhibition  is one, setting up on Monday, open from Tuesday.  Since we will be taking it in turns to be sitting in the exhibition we're also billed as being artists in residence.  (Follow the link to see full details of our exhibition, including which days each of us will be there.) I've been artist in residence at Nature In Art a few times and people do like to come and chat to find out about the person behind the artwork.  We're hoping there will be lots of visitors because the touring exhibition which will be there at the same time is the Wildlife Photographer of the Year. 

So, as I say, it's a funny time of year.  Generally at this point I'm recovering from autumn markets, collecting what I laughingly call my wits and pondering on new ideas.  This year, though, I was straight back into the pottery making beastly dishes and firing them and the vases that I've been making on and off for a year or more.  My showroom is now full to bursting with fish and lizards.  You can have a sneak preview of one of the vases now, but you'll have to wait for the exhibition to see the rest:

Back and front views, obviously.

Then, as heralded by my last blog post, I had planned to work on new canvasses.  Unfortunately, the ideas I'd had last summer were just too far away and I couldn't get back to them in a hurry.  I thought if I spent an afternoon tidying my studio it might help.  This turned into an entire week of tidying, cleaning, throwing out masses of rubbish and freecycling a lot of other things and moving things round a bit.   This was much more the sort of thing I would expect to be doing at this time of year and in fact it really did free me up so that this week I have been working on a group of new, tiny canvasses.  I've finished the creative part.  Now I just need to attach them to their stretchers, saw up backing board, attach it and hanging hooks.  That shouldn't take too long.  However, I also need to finish re-painting my display kit (shelves, boards, blocks, etc), make a few greetings cards to top up the most popular ones, make sure I've got all my publicity literature printed out, make labels for all the textiles pieces and pack everything up.  I've got three days, including today.  I think it should be possible so long as I stop writing this and go and get on with it ......

Just For The Present

"Just For The Present" is now open!  It will be at the Cotswold Craftsmen Gallery, Market Street, Nailsworth, until 24th November.  Tuesdays - Saturdays, 10.00 - 5.00

Artist's statement

As we develop as artists, our ideas sometimes take on a life of their own and lead us to new discoveries and passions so that we sometimes find ourselves taking surprising roads.  2012 has been a year when I have been following new roads which may themselves lead in directions I haven’t yet imagined.  So, Just For The Present, what you see here is a selection of the work I am making currently. 

This year I’ve returned to my roots in fashion (nearly forty years ago I studied fashion and textiles at college) and I’m delighted to be showing some of my new silk-painted scarves.  Having worked on silk-painting in isolation, I then moved on to give machine embroidery the same treatment and three new pieces portraying lizards are worked entirely in machine stitching with no other added colour.

Lizards seem to have become my theme of the moment in ceramics too as they are ideal subjects for rich decoration.  As well as my tableware ranges, I’m now making more one-off items - mugs, bowls, plates and vases - decorated with individual designs in coloured underglazes, slips, lustres and precious metal lustres. 

Just for the present, these are my preoccupations.  Next year – who knows?

 The Purple Corner!

 

Hearts and Flowers goes live

It looks like a fairly small space when you go downstairs at The Cotswold Craftsmen Gallery but I've come to the conclusion that that's partly because of the lowish ceiling.  In fact, as you can see, half the room (someone else has the other half) gave me plenty of hanging space.  The space is supposed to be for exhibitions of flat work but I was allowed plinths and shelves against my walls (as well as my card spinner) so the hearts and flowers theme could be exploited in full.

I'm toying with doing some textiles pieces with hearts.  It would give me an opportunity to use some great colours.  But would anyone like one for their home?  I'm surprised to find that I would!  Following on from the earlier post where I explained my reluctance to use hearts at all, I've discovered that context is all.  A richly coloured and stitched heart would fit just right in my study!  Or my living room.  Will have to think about this one.  Comments on the desirability or otherwise of hearts as home decor are welcomed.

In the mean time, I enjoyed putting this exhibition together very much and enjoyed writing a little blurb to go in it almost as much. I put the exhibition up on Sunday but it opened today. 

"Hearts and Flowers - an exhibition of work for Valentines and other Romantics.

In between the hearts and flowers there's a smattering of cats and a smidgeon of chickens as well as something for the starry-eyed.  This exhibition is about what appeals to the romantic in all of us."

 

Hearts and Flowers

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We were well overdue for a change of picture on this blog, if nothing else.  Dare I say it?  The picture of Charlie in the snow was beginning to look unseasonal. Yes, I know, there's still plenty of winter left for more snow.

But on the other hand, Valentine's Day approaches and M reckons that if you start with midsummer's day being 21st June and then divide the year up accordingly, 14th February marks the beginning of spring.  It's a cheering thought.

Anyway, I'm celebrating this particular season with a new exhibition Downstairs at Cotswold Craftsmen, in Nailsworth. I've always done the silk-painted cards with hearts on and hearts have been one of the shapes on lustred mugs and last year I started making heart-shaped dishes and mugs and bowls with a heart design.  The cards sell out throughout the year and all the heart-shaped dishes sold out too, so it seemed a good opportunity to just go for it and enter the spirit of the thing.

You can't see on the photo but there is a lovely sugar-pink border of hearts on the poster.  What you can see is heart-shaped cut-outs of various work and this was fun to learn.  These days it seems that whatever you need to learn, someone has put a tutorial for it on the internet, and so I was able to learn about heart-shaped masks and produced the poster above. 

Last week was spent firing heart pots, making Valentine cards (of which more in another blog) and delivering to By Local, Gloucestershire Arts and Crafts Centre and The Made In Stroud Shop.  This week I need to make more general greetings cards and pack up for setting up the exhibition next Sunday.  Today, though, is nominally a day off and I'll be ironing and cooking.  And maybe dipping into my book on learning CSS as well ...

Another Beastly Art Exhibition

Boy, has this year been complicated so far. I think what has happened is that although I am used to juggling, I had not fully understood that I have actually added another element and, unsurprisingly, one or another has been dropped from time to time. I hadn't looked at things this way before but it makes sense of a feeling I've had that I haven't really done anything as well as I usually do. And so it is that Another Beastly Art Exhibition has only two days to run and all I can manage is one photo and a few lines.

The exhibition looks great, as usual, and it's gratifying that even regular customers who've visited our exhibitions for years can still walk in and say "wow!". I really love that we have the wow factor and am proud of it.

Monday is our last day and then on Tuesday I shall be taking my textiles work to hang at Gloucestershire Arts and Crafts Centre in the new Lock Cafe Gallery. Watch this space. I may be more organised about posting to it in future!

I bought a hat!

I'm amazed it's been more than a month since I last blogged. You would think life had been full-on for all of that time and perhaps M would say that it has, but looking back over the month it doesn't really seem that way to me. It has, though, been very busy since we got back from France, two and a half weeks ago.

The reason for coming back when we did was that I had got behind with my pottery work and have a deadline coming up in the form of Another Beastly Art Exhibition. Although the time needed to make the pots was relatively short, one has to allow a week or two for things to dry, depending on the weather, and then time for firings. I can fire every other day at a pinch but not if I am having to do anything else as unpacking, glazing and repacking can only just be done in a day. So today I turned some fruit bowls and that was the last making I am doing until some time in September. Tomorrow will be for glazing.

I was grumpy about returning from France, not least because I had just got into some new ideas in my textiles work. There are new pieces I was working on there that I haven't even unpacked yet and I can't wait to frame them and see how they've turned out. Working on these pieces led me to ideas for other developments and the frustration was that I knew once I had to interrupt the work, I won't be able to take up where I left off. I'll have to do some more pieces from where I am before the new ideas can be regenerated.

One of the reasons I haven't started the framing is that for the last week I've been building a new website for Gloucestershire Arts and Crafts Centre. We had a webs.com site before and there were many advantages to this, not least that it's free. However, it turned out that there were problems every few months with some UK users not being able to see any webs.com sites for a week or so and since everyone was blaming everyone else for the problem each time I lost confidence in its ever being permanently solved. We were quite possibly losing potential customers because of this so we decided to go for a domain name and a new site. I know my limitations in web building and am thinking I will soon want to investigate CSS but this was a job that needed getting on with so I decided to continue in my usual manner. And I have really loved doing it. This kind of work is really just as creative as any other that I do. They all have their disciplines - certainly making functional pottery is a very disciplined skill - it's just that this is a different sort.

So there's the homepage. And I have to say, I'm very pleased with the result. The homepage is only a taster - do go and look at the rest.

I was telling J, another potter, about this yesterday and saying that I've never had any trouble blowing my own trumpet. Apparently he's the same. M and I agree we had never noticed. It seems to be a British thing that one should not sing one's own praises, but I don't see why not. I'm fair-minded about it. I say when I fall short, point out work that didn't turn out as it should. People don't like that either and rush to say I am a perfectionist. (They may have a point there.) I just feel comfortable in my own skin and with my own talents and don't think it's wrong to say when I think I've made something good. Which is where today's title comes in.

I do, as it happens, have a very large head. Something like seven and three quarters, if that means anything to you. And then in the summer I wear my hair up on top in a bun. So hats are out just when you want something to keep the sun from your eyes. But in Chauvigny market M suddenly spotted some bright pink floppy-brimmed hats and, sometimes conventional and romatic that he is, said how lovely I would look in something like that. "They never fit," I said. "Look!" So he looked at this bright pink floppy-brimmed hat fitting comfortably on my head.

Busy, busy, busy.

Er, well, that's it really.  I'm sad I haven't had time to even write a few lines lately, but some time may come up soon, I hope.  What am I busy with?

• Firing pots, including new designs ready for exhibition
• Publicity and organisation of exhibition
• Packing and delivering pots to ByLocal in Cheltenham
• Helping prepare room for new arts & crafts shop in Gloucester - opening Friday 2nd April!
• Setting up admin for new shop
• Packing up my own work for new shop to deliver on Thursday
• Support for workers on greenhouse plot!

Going solo

Things were getting rather stale round here.  The last couple of months had brought the lowest sales figures for a long time, partly because I had to turn down at least one opportunity because I was still not back making pots and other outlets had fizzled out for one reason or another.  Eventually I fired the kiln the other day, only to have one of the most disappointing firings for a long time.  This kiln has been uneven since I had it and there are things I can and do do to counteract that but sometimes it still surprises and therefore greatly disappoints me with how uneven it can be.  There are still more things to try, which always makes me hopeful.  But a downturn in selling opportunities and sales income together with a downer of a kiln firing didn't make me happy!

There have been things in melting pots, though.  One of the melting pots - probably the biggest! - is my own mind.  I may have looked idle in the pottery department but I have not been idle in the business planning department.  At first sight, the recently offered opportunity to have a gallery all to myself in April looked impractical, especially as there are other things in the pipeline and bearing in mind that I have three missed months of production to catch up on.  Yesterday, though, I made a decision.  Commit myself to working on sales and being away from my workshop for April in order to get the sales figures lifted.  There are opportunities coming up in the autumn, so it's now that I particularly need to give things a lift. 

So.  My first solo exhibition will be from 13th - 17th April at the Cotswold Craftsmen Gallery, Nailsworth!

I'm extremely excited about this.