About
Loraine worked as a cartographer for London University before studying ceramics at Central St Martins, and it is this background in academia that underpins her narrative ceramics. On graduating in 1990, she established The Arches Studios in Peckham, from where she has worked since.
In 1996 she was awarded a Churchill Trust Travelling Fellowship, and recently she has been selected by Homo Faber as a Master Craftsman, and elected a Fellow of The Royal Geographical Society. Her pieces have been described as ‘work which excitingly illustrates the fusion of Concept, Content and Traditional Craft’.
The exquisite palm-sized porcelain globes for which she has become known led to her artwork being collected internationally. Commissions include a special editions for The Fife Arms, Linley, an Apollo 15 astronaut, and a bespoke pocket globe for The Royal Observatory. World Skills Organisation commissioned a series of pocket globes which were presented to world leaders, and museum purchases include The Museum of London and The National Maritime Museum.
Of her work, inspiration and motivation Loraine says: “Maps have an implied honesty, yet the transformation from sphere to flat plain requires something to yield – to be stretched, shrunk, or erased. This alters the ‘facts’ and influences perception of place, and with it, our sense of belonging and identity. My work plays on this riff of altered representation of factual mapping. I enjoy the lyricism of transforming two-dimensional maps of three-dimensional places, back into three-dimensional objects.
Playing with scale and volume, whether it’s a pocket globe putting the world in your hand, or topography with amplified relief, I aim to draw focus to a particular theme, be it environmental or social inequality, or celebrating momentous voyages. Maps can excite, engage, inspire, motivate and document history. My practice is honed by three decades of fine clay yielding to fingertips, using improvised tools to create surfaces with map-like clarity. By transcribing source material gathered via the Internet into clay, the shifting digital landscape of our time is transformed into permanent analogue artefact.”
