For 2019 we are inviting UK universities and Higher Education institutes running ceramic courses to submit ideas for a Student Demonstrations. These students will give a demonstration of a ceramic technique or process that will take place at a dedicated work space in a marquee on site during scheduled times over the weekend. Demonstrations will last 30 minutes and students will work on rotating shifts. This is an excellent opportunity to promote the facilities and courses on offer and allow potential students to talk to students themselves to get a flavour of the courses on offer. This was very successful in recent years and is run in partnership with Potclays Ltd. Applications are now closed.
2019 STUDENT DEMONSTRATORS
Elin Hughes
BA Ceramics, Cardiff Metropolitan University
Workshop: Throwing and (de)constructing
‘I am interested in examining the traditional process of throwing on the potter’s wheel through a contemporary frame of deconstructing and re-configuring thrown forms. I slice, fracture and mutilate the thrown surfaces, turning shapes inside out to explore tension in the clay in order to build dynamic sculptural vessels. I would like to demonstrate both halves of my making process. Firstly, the throwing of what I call my sculptural components and secondly the constructing together of these sections when leather hard. This second half is an exciting, unpredictable process as I work with the nuances of each new vessel form, improvising and working in response to the clay’s shifting centre of gravity.’
Natasha Parker-Edwards
BA(Hons) Creative Arts: Art and Dance
Bath School of Art and Design
Natasha aims to integrate aspects of her contemporary dance practice into the field of 3D contemporary art. Investigating the world in a psychogeographical manner, she aims to explore materials and surfaces in relation to the human body, primarily using the sense ‘touch’. Her sculptural, performance based work comments on her own angsts and investigates the dialogue between the process of making and the human action. She is currently interested in questions like ‘In what ways are the boundaries we place around art-forms imagined or real?’ and ‘How might exploring work that exists on the edges or crossing these boundaries open up new creative possibilities?’.
Natasha will be presenting ‘Femme Maison (After Bourgeois)’ during lunchtimes in the Theatre on Saturday and Sunday. She plans to stay in and around Bath or Bristol once she graduates with goals to develop the piece further. She also wants to continue teaching and participating in collaborative projects and hopes her creative endeavors will allow her to travel in the near future.
Femme Maison (After Bourgeois)
‘I need to make things. The physical interaction with the materials has a curative effect. I need the physical acting out, I need to have these objects in relation to my body’ Louise Bourgeois (1911-2010).
Take a glimpse into the world of French-American artist and sculptor Bourgeois, through this movement response to some of her key works. The multidisciplinary piece is driven by Bourgeois’ themes of gender, domesticity, sexuality and desire. She obsessed over ‘the house’ and how architecture symbolises a social world that attempts to define individuals in contrast to the inner world of emotion – ideas which are interwoven with my own angst as a young woman moving into adulthood.
Ross Andrews
MRES Ceramics.
Cardiff School of Art and Design
WORKSHOP: Digital craft in collaboration with traditional hand-skill process.
Ross is investigating questions of embodiment in terms of the extended ‘reach’ afforded through technologies such as the internet. His practice took shape through the combination of digital technology, 3D modelling software, CAD and the analogue traditional skills of mould making and casting ceramics. This work directly takes digitally captured terrain, in this instance the Welsh valleys of the Brecon Beacons and translates it into a vessel. The demonstration will show the skill of pouring and opening a plaster mould, refining of pre-cast and fired examples as well as a video demonstration of the digital process behind the 3D printed objects.
“I have always been inspired by architecture and means of digital extension within making alongside traditional craft methods. Through studying in a multi-disciplinary degree course, we were encouraged to explore through making and gain a broad knowledge of materials and an alchemic methodology of mixing processes and materials. My practice took shape through the combination of digital technology, 3D modelling software, CAD and the analogue traditional skills of mould making and casting of ceramic,metals with the addition of wood. To produce pieces of work that challenge contemporary ideas of craft and the handmade with the hybrid landscape of digital craft. Only after this 3 years of exploration, did I then focus on the medium of ceramics.Through undertaking my research, it has meant my practical making has taken a less fundamental role within my practice. Although I am still making and I believe that making helps me progress my thinking, When the hands are working, the mind is free to think and contemplate the thoughts and arguments that surround my research.”
Supported by the Arts Council of Wales and Potclays Ltd
