About

The body and references to the human form have long been enclosed within ceramics — ritualistic ancient pots with sensuous curves, opening rims drawn in and rounded, their features (lips, necks, feet) anatomical namesakes. The body appears through clay as both an expressive and abstracted entity, and as a trace of the maker’s own presence. The figure of the vessel lingers and informs ceramicists, who push these enduring themes from functional and domestic to figurative and conceptual.

In lieu of such developments considered in Earthly Bodies, the third ceramic exhibition at Sarah Myerscough Gallery, the gallery is holding a seminar with ceramicists Julian Stair, Mella Shaw and Jonathan Keep in conversation with researcher and writer Martina Margetts. Exhibiting as part of Earthly Bodies, the seminar considers these ceramicists and potters in sculptural terms, each differently engaging with materiality, space and form. There will be an opportunity for questions from the audience.

Julian Stair’s powerful, thrown vessels are a mediation of personhood. Julian has also gone on to commemorate and memorialise the body after death, through making monumental funerary-ware. The corporeal statures of his vessels pay homage to those lost, while exploring notions of containment and bodily metamorphosis. 

Through her ceramic works, Mella Shaw also deals with the grievance of bodies. Researching the overuse of marine sonar and its devastating effects on the sonic communication between whales, her Sounding Line pieces take shape based on the inner ear bones of the gigantic and endangered mammals. She also ethically incorporates the matter of these beings, using the bone-ash from the remains of Northern bottlenose whales that have been beached on the West Coast of Scotland. 

Jonathan Keep is a ‘traditionalist’ potter synthesising 3D-printing technology, probing the relationship between a maker and their object. His works are renowned for their investigation into form and natural symmetry, all while deftly navigating between domestic and experimental sculptural forms.