Pancheon by Isaac Button and shards from workshop site 2015

Dave with proving box – Handmade Bakery

Palimpsest Landscape – Soil Hill, 2015

STATEMENT: 

My work is primarily focused to develop a narrative between:

• a physical exploration of place
• consideration of the impact of human activity (including my own) on the natural world
• endeavours to create functional ceramics associated with:
  • the places I am investigating
  • the people that I meet as part of this process.

Rather than trying to “make a point”, I find myself wanting to present work that would provoke reflection, discussion and consideration of our relationship with material culture and the environment – leaving people to make up their own minds. Over 2015-6, I chose to bring my work together with a  fresh perspective – specifically around the concept of palimpsest.

The essence of this idea, can be summarized as a surface scraped clean to be used again, originally relating to the historic re-use of vellum (an ancient material for the production of books), which in the Medieval period was in short supply. The concept has been translated to a way of viewing landscape by W.G. Hoskins, in his seminal work The Making of the English Landscape (1970) in which he illustrated how palimpsest could be used to describe the landscape itself, as a series of cumulative layers, holding evidence of human activity and a patchwork of clues that could be used to understand changes in human society and economy, and our relationship with the natural environment.

I felt that this concept had relevance, not only to my investigation of landscape – but also to my work as a ceramicist, given that so much of our work involves the shaping and building up of layers; clay, slip and glaze, altering these as we develop our forms to serve their purpose – either functional or artistic – or both.