These golden days

John Clare’s poems for the Autumn months in his Shepherds Calendar are among the most beautiful of the year, as well as the most entertaining – his accounts of nutting and other active pleasures balance the customary melancholy of the season, and this year particularly the Autumn weather has been so ravishing that it’s been hard to feel gloomy. And now that we’re on the very edge of winter, with the first frosts and foggy mornings, our thoughts turn to the snowy delights to come.

This year I’ve been thinking even more than usual about the passing of time, the turn of the year and the dance of the seasons. In August I delivered some artist’s books to the National Library of Scotland, and had the great pleasure of unfolding the four great ‘carpet books’ that make up Love & Freedom: Burns’ Year for the curators to experience.

The four books are each made from a huge sheet of handmade paper (Khadi’s great white – at 2m x 80cm among the largest handmade paper sheets in the world), painted, lettered, torn and folded into a sequence of pages to form a book, but possible to unfold and reform to the single huge sheet.

One of my aims for these books is that they should work both in terms of a single image composition on the whole sheet, as well as through the sequence of individual pages:

I’ll be featuring these books in detail throughout the year in 2012, season by season.

Meanwhile we’ve been preparing for our winter exhibition, which this year is in the gallery at the award-winning Woolfson & Tay bookshop in Bermondsey Square in London, close to the south foot of Tower Bridge. River songs in winter is a collection of my new work in clay, handmade paper and driftwood from the Thames, including artist’s books, wall-hung banners in clay and driftwood, and some lovely pots. For more details, have a look at the page about the exhibition on Woolfson & Tay’s website, and I’ll be writing about it here in December. It’s a selling show (so you can buy off the wall to take away), and it’s on from 29th November right through December until 8th January 2012, changing throughout the month.

Harvest

August was to John Clare a pivot of the year, as the harvest drew a concerted effort from everyone in the rural community, and the ‘bustling day’ took precedence over everything else – until it was done, and time to celebrate. This large serving dish from the Shepherds Calendar dinner service is a centrepiece of the plate rack, with its warm appetising colours and the beautiful text. Here’s the back:

Though we’d rather like to hang out in the sunshine (now some’s finally here) throughout August, it’s going to be rather a busy month for us too, as we’re taking some of this year’s harvest to Edinburgh. My partner Frances will be reading from her acclaimed new novel The Principle of Camouflage at the Edinburgh International Book Festival, where it is also an entry for the Festival’s Newton First Book Award – and as it has also been suggested as a possible contender for the Guardian First Book Award this year, it’s receiving a lot of attention for a book from a small publisher. Frances is also reading in the Festival’s Amnesty International Imprisoned Writers series, from the work of Nizametdin Akhmetov, a Bashkir poet.

On the same trip, we’ll also be delivering some of my work to the National Library of Scotland; I’m very proud to say that the NLS is acquiring three of my artist’s books, Season’s Dancing (with text by Robert Burns), Love and Freedom: Burns’ Year (a group of four books, one for each season), and Light Music (from a text by Margaret Tait).

This is the August page from Seasons Dancing, a concertina book made from 24 sheets of handmade paper (A3) which opens out to a continuous circle joining December and January, and celebrating the cyclic dance of the seasons with fragments from Burns’ poems.

The ring of months is double sided, so that as it stands opened out, you can see the months in sequence on the front, and inside, the rhythmic flow of the turning seasons:

The outer pages are painted and collaged month by month, and the pages on the inner side are made with handmade papers in different colours for the flow of the seasons, with Burns’ text dancing round:

Here you can see the December page (And O for the joys of a long winter night) linked to January (That merry day the year begins) – and so on round the year.

Round and round the seasons go

This year I’ve been working on a series of contemporary illuminated manuscripts reflecting the passing of time and the turning year. The largest works (so far) are the group of four books that make up Love and Freedom: Burns’ Year which will also be in the NLS collection; these four books are each made from a single huge sheet of handmade paper, torn and folded into a sequence of pages, but possible to restore to the whole sheet again, like a magic carpet that transports you to another time and place, but which you can also fold up and carry about with you – the essence of ‘book’, in fact. I’ll be writing more about the ideas behind these books (and showing how they look) in September; meanwhile you can see Light Music with its luminous text from Margaret Tait’s film Colour Poems in a page by page sequence in a Work in Focus post – click here.

If you’d like more information about any of my work, please leave me a note in the comments box below, or click on contact details for other ways to get in touch.

Waiting for the swallows

Now that Spring is really here, and in John Clare’s happy words

The trees still deepen in their bloom

Grass greens the meadowlands

And flowers with every morning come

we can really start looking forward to the arrival of the swallows and swifts, since the daffodils have already dared. I love the changing lengthening light of Spring, and the suddenness of the long-awaited transformation, when everything charges out at once.

I’m continuing work on my series of Books of Hours, or contemporary illuminated manuscripts, on the theme of the passing year, working with different forms of the book. Some of them are very large, but The turning year is made from a single sheet of handmade ‘elephant’ paper (70cm x 50cm), torn and folded not into my usual cyclic sequence of pages, but this time as a continuous flow, starting at one end and following a fluid timeline which pours off the other end. The full sheet, before tearing and folding looked like this:

and the sequence of pages like this:

This was a lovely sheet of paper to work with, as it had beautiful irregular deckle edges, with even a few tags of paper floating at the corners. I particularly like the lively uniqueness of each handmade sheet, and enjoy including its quirks into the book’s character. The torn and folded sequence of pages looks like this:

My preoccupation with rivers, seas and watery places is reaching flood level as I prepare for Watermark, my exhibition in the Ice House gallery in Holland Park, which is open daily from 7th to 22nd May, 11am to 7pm.

I’ll be showing waterfalls in clay, driftwood signposts, several kingfishers, fountains and storms, tall ships and circling seas, as well as Van Gogh’s clouds and swallows on the Thames – and during May I’ll be showing some of the works in the exhibition here in my May post.

Meanwhile, I have been doing some other work, including a very enjoyable commission for a portrait of a thatched cottage, in my ongoing series of architectural low-relief sculptures.

I’ve been making these for 25 years now (my first was in 1986), and I must have made many hundreds by now – I love the individuality of each subject, and really enjoy how a likeness develops through the process, so that the finished portrait becomes a very tangible image of the house. I made this one in terracotta – the same clay as the bricks – but I use stoneware for a stone-built house. I have made a portrait of a Swiss log cabin, but I did it in clay, rather than matchsticks. Some more examples can be seen on the Architectural reliefs page, and commissions start at £200. I welcome enquiries about commissions – you can leave me a note in the comments box below, or if you prefer, click on contact details for other ways to get in touch.

Stories and marks

John Clare’s ‘tale of spring’ is a very encouraging beginning to the month, promising an imaginative glimpse of what’s to come. His delight in the narrative ballad of the seasons is a constant inspiration in my work, and I love the idea of the story of the turning year. Translating this deeply familiar theme into words that strike us as fresh each time we read them, and accurate, John Clare transforms a time-honoured, repetitive trope into a work of art that captures the essence of individual experience, universally, giving us back something that we’ve perhaps lost or forgotten.

This idea is the inspiration behind my Books of Hours, contemporary illuminated manuscripts contemplating the movement of time and the mystical dance of the seasons through fragments of poetry, exploring different ways of translating the text into objects of illumination. This month I’m working on Seasons dancing, setting Burns’ poetry of the turning year – which I’ll be showing in these pages next month. Meanwhile, I’ll show you the March page from Singing the Year, with text by Vita Sackville-West, with just a glimpse of February past and April to come:

Capturing the feel of a text that in itself is vividly visual is a very exciting challenge to me, and one that it’s not easy to define in terms of actual process or techniques. I try to let the light through from the text, rather than illustrate it. In the Van Gogh exhibition at the Royal Academy last summer, I overheard a puzzled visitor say ‘It’s just marks, isn’t it?’  And later in the year, when we were revisiting the sacred texts in the John Ritblat Gallery containing some of the most precious treasures of the British Library, another overheard remark was ‘These are just stories’. Marks and stories is just what we do.

A painting of mine is the cover image for The Principle of Camouflage, my partner Frances Bingham’s new book (a literary novel, coming out in April this year, and available now from Two Ravens Press). I painted Sea light in response to the story, rather than as an illustration to it; I was aiming to catch the fleeting luminous quality of the light, and something of the particular space and atmosphere evoked.

I used a board with quite a rough ground, prepared many years ago by Frances’ great uncle, the artist Guy Worsdell, who had a studio at St Ives and whose paintings and woodcuts (though not often landscapes) are drenched in that light. I like to think that some of it comes through my overlaid marks.

Maureen Duffy has said of The Principle of Camouflage:

A true work of the imagination, transporting Prospero’s isle, and us, to wartime Britain on a shining wave of sea images.

and this vivid imagery has inspired several other works of mine, including a small group of elephants (artist’s books made from a single sheet of handmade paper, painted, torn and folded into a sequence of pages). Sometimes the setting of the text seems like a form of performance – a way of inhabiting the text in the moment, not unlike reading it aloud, in the way it concentrates the mind on the form and flow of the words while making the marks. I will be showing some of these books in Watermark, my next exhibition, at the Ice House Gallery in Holland Park during May (I’ll be adding full details here soon) and meanwhile I’ll give you a preview of one of the books, called Storm.

Before tearing and folding, the sheet looked like this:

And after, like this:

I’ll be adding details about Watermark next month. Meanwhile, if you’d like more information about any of my work, please leave me a comment in the box below, or click on contact details for other ways to get in touch.

The turning year

This year, my Work in Focus posts will be monthly, including some of my current work and some from my archive. Much of my work is seasonal – or rather I enjoy responding to the changing light and the feel of the turning year – and I’ll be showing some progressing series of work, as we go along. In 1993 I made a dinner service, setting texts from John Clare’s A Shepherds Calendar with a plate or bowl for each month, and I’ll be starting the monthly features with his apposite observations.

I’ve already begun work on one of my major plans for this year: a series of Books of Hours, or contemporary illuminated manuscripts, setting different texts that explore the turning year in individually handmade, lettered and decorated books. I’ll be showing several of these in the coming months and discussing some of the processes, ideas and problems. I’m planning works on several different scales from small to very large, but the first in the series is a small concertina book made with handmade paper, setting a medieval latin text by Boethius in a beautiful translation by Helen Waddell. It’s called The flowering year.

The concertina book opens out to a full stretch of about 4 foot long, so it will stand along a shelf. The economical text conveys the feel of each season so accurately that it seems possible to experience the whole year in this short length, or the turn of a few pages, and the rainy winter page feels very right for today. I must work on a bit more snow.

Among the first of my Books of Hours, I’ve also made a one-elephant book, from a single sheet of handmade paper torn and folded to form the sequence of pages: it’s called The turning year, and the text is my own.

The whole sheet looks like this:

And like this, once torn and folded:

I’m planning some books in quite different formats, and some on a large scale, so I look forward to showing them as they progress.

Of course, midwinter’s a good time to be making pots too (warming work), and Helen Waddell’s translations from Latin texts have also provided inspiration there. On this large dish I’ve set her rendering of a text by Marbod of Rennes, which combines an encouraging glimpse of Spring with a little seasonal festivity:

For more information about any of my work, please leave me a note in the comment box below, or click on contact details for other ways to get in touch.

Glad Christmass

John Clare’s December poem from A Shepherds Calender is a special favourite, inspiring many of my seasonal pots over the years. I particularly like his spelling, and his greeting between friends and neighbours when meeting ‘their Christmass cheer to share’:

Glad Christmas and a happy year

Winter is come

In this snowy week, I’ve been making an artist’s book setting a text from John Clare’s evocative poem Snow storm, called In another land. It’s made from one sheet of handmade paper, painted, lettered, torn and folded into a sequence of 6 double pages. I’ll show it to you page by page, and then describe the making process.

In considering the setting of a text for these books, it’s important to me that the overall design of the whole page should work as well as the individual pages – and that means bearing in mind that the book is turned as the reader reads, making the text on some pages upside-down and some sideways to the main overall image. With this text, I first folded the paper, then painted a snowy scene with sky, hills, and a winter tree overhanging a frozen path or stream with snow-mounded hedges:

Then I added the lettering (with its snowy burthen), following the cycle of the pages starting from top left:

Then, when this was dry, I painted and lettered the covers (in the right place) on the other side, and when those were dry, I tore the paper into the sequence of pages:

then folded the pages into sequence:

then I put it in my patent book-press:

Opened out, the finished work looks like this:

For more information about In another world, my other one-elephant books or any of my work, please leave me a note in the comments box below, or click on contact details for other ways to get in touch.

Parlours of heaven

The long slanting light and the wild beauty of the heath and hedgerows at this time of year always yields a fruitful inspiration for my work. This blackberry bowl has a characteristically visionary inscription by Walt Whitman (from Leaves of Grass), celebrating the extraordinary beauty and significance of the common natural things that surround us, a view he shares with so many of my favourite writers, including John Clare, Vita Sackville West, Virginia Woolf, Kathleen Raine, and so on.

This small plate (8″ across) is the October plate in my 12 piece dinner service from John Clare’s Shepherd’s Calendar, which has a plate or bowl for each month of the year with inscriptions from each month’s poem. (I’ll be showing this large group of pots in my first post of the year next year, January 2011.) I particularly like painting blackberries; the shining ripe fruits, the prickly twigs and the light through the leaves. The text here is painted freehand with a brush in a rich dark brown mix of underglaze oxides, fired with a clear glaze.

This apple bowl also has a lovely text from John Clare:

Where blushing apples round and red

Load down the boughs and pat the head

For more information about fruit bowls, Autumn pots or any of my work, please leave me a note in the comments box below, or click on contact details for other ways to get in touch.

Harvest home

Considering what happened last bank holiday weekend (see a rather reckless post) I won’t discuss the weather this time. Instead, some more seasonal pots.

At this time of year I like to make pots to celebrate the last of the summer, and ‘all the summer’s fruitful treasure’ (Nash) – especially big punch jugs of the old fashioned kind that used to come round at the harvest home full of sharp new cider or hoppy beer. This curvaceous jug takes more than a couple of litres, and helps the jollity on with a lovely inscription from Herrick:

Come Sons of Summer – by whose toil

We are the lords of Wine and Oil -

Crowned with the Ears of Corn now come

And to the pipe sing Harvest Home.

I also like to make big bread plates with wheat ears, poppies and cornflowers – the inscription on this one’s by John Clare.

I love the combination of the glowing golden ochre and a clear azure blue that we (sometimes) see so much in August. One of the first pots I made in these colours (in 1993) was this open flared bowl with a lovely inscription by John Clare: 

All these pots are thrown on the wheel in white stoneware and decorated with freehand brushwork in underglaze oxides, under a clear glaze fired to 1255 degrees. They are fully useable, waterproof and sturdy, and each is a signed one-off. Prices from £60 for the 1 litre cider jug to £150 for the big punch jug.

If you’d like to know more about these pots or any of my work, please leave me a note in the comments box below, or click on contact details for other ways to get in touch.

A Midsummer Cushion

July is the month of John Clare; one of our customs at Potters’ Yard is to celebrate his birthday (as we do Shakespeare’s) and we always have a picnic from this great plate that I made for his bicentenary in 1993. 

It is a very old custom among villagers in summer time to stick a piece of greensward full of field flowers & place it in their cottages which ornaments are called Midsummer Cushions

Plates thrown on the wheel have a special kind of strength – the opening up of the wedge of clay on the turning wheel forms a structural spiral, setting all the clay’s molecules in a spiralling alignment that allows for quite large plates and flat dishes to be made without cracking, as long as the drying is carefully controlled. I don’t usually make them this big though (42cm across); my most regularly commissioned sizes are

10″ (26cm – good dinner plate or cheeseplate – usually about £75) and

12″ (30cm – good for serving dish – usually about £90)

- or the smaller 8″ (20cm – usually about £50) for sideplates or baby plates, commissioned for births, christenings and namedays.

Another intrinsic strength is in the high firing temperature of the stoneware clay I use; the clay vitrifies in the firing – becomes stone-like in its physical construction, the gaps between the molecules close up, so that the fired clay is no longer porous and absorbent, but hard and compressed. This of course adds to its durability and strength, especially when combined with a hard covering glaze. The only enemy then is a tiled floor and a dog to trip over.

Long ago I made a nameplate for a friend’s restaurant, which he fixed proudly to the wall. After a few years it fell down, hitting a table on the way down to the carpeted floor – it was completely undamaged, but it made a good dent in the table top. It’s now on a shelf on a platestand. We still use some of the first plates I made (in ?1989) everyday; the John Clare dinner service I made in 1993, with a plate or bowl for each month, we keep for special occasions – and we use the Midsummer Cushion plate only once a year on 13th July.

I sometimes make plates not on the wheel, with a slab of clay hand-rolled (with a rolling pin) and formed, dried and fired on a support made from the same clay, which is removed after firing, leaving the plate’s wavey rim self-supporting. These rather sculptural objects each have their own special shape, retaining the ‘selvedge’ made by the rolling process, and the irregular line – but they’re quite strong enough for use (though I wouldn’t put them in a washing-up machine) and they look very groovy on the table. I particularly like the clear strong colours for serving food, and the unusual, irregular shape showing the plate’s origin in the soft, malleable clay and the process that formed it.

There are more examples of different plates on the inner space and Meadow pages (see links above left).  If you’d like to know more, please leave me a comment below, or click on contact details.