The Jetty Gallery

The Jetty Gallery         www.thejettygallery.com

Patricia's work is informed by the powerful landscape around her on the Isle of Skye. It has developed in response to a feeling of connection with the passage across the land of its past inhabitants. She makes mostly functional forms, boxes, bowls, jars that represent her vision of the landscape. 

"The surfaces of the land erode by forces of climate and human intervention, but the substance remains constant and immutable. We scratch the land by our presence here and traces of the past are drawn all over the landscape, remaining in their ruined form, as shadow monuments to the communities who worked the land.

I use techniques in my clay work to reflect these processes. The pieces are made by throwing, texturing and altering or by beating, stretching and carving. Colours are achieved using slips, oxides and glazes but most of all by the firing process.

The weather plays a large part in the progress of the firing and the subsequent smoking. It is a fast and immediate technique which contrasts nicely with the slower and more measured process of making the pots.

 I hope that the natural forms, colours and textures of the work will encourage the viewer to feel and engage with a landscape beyond our daily experience. I feel that as the world advances technically the surfaces we contact become increasingly synthetic and machine finished; what  challenges the modern human being is the reality of nature - wild, unkempt, dirty, unpackaged visceral experience."

Patricia Shone