Simon Fell ceramics, ceramic sculpture in west London

RELATED

Homepage

Change the world - rebuild it
in clay.

I work with clay because it is such a responsive material. It is a pleasure to work with a medium that does (almost) what you want. Clay can be moulded when it is soft, when pressed it holds the shape you give it, when it dries to a leather-hard state it can be worked like soft wood or plaster, carved, cut and re-joined in sheets.

Working with clay seems to have a therapeutic value too. Could this be because it is satisfying to have an idea then to realise it in a physical form? Or is it just good for us to exercise our dexterity as it is to exercise our minds and bodies in general? Then again it could simply be that working with our hands has value as a form of play and that part of the benefit is in the playing rather than in the result.

What to make of clay in the 21st century?

What is really interesting to me about this medium is what to make with it in the modern world. Both the sculptural and the ceramic traditions are in flux and their historic purposes in question. Clay work sits uneasily between the fields of art and craft but this is only to be expected, the material will take whatever meaning you give it, it is receptive and open, it has no problem, the difficult bit comes when you try to sell what you have made, where do you place your work to let it tell it's own story?

Glazing my work tends to put it in the field of ceramics, but my artistic approach pushes it towards the category of sculpture. The work tends to be small (like most pottery) largely because it has to fit inside a kiln but it is not designed to hold liquids or food and has no practical purpose other than as something to be seen and understood (like sculpture).

Art for ceramics sake

My work has several strands of ideas running through it, including an iconagraphy drawn from my history as man and boy mixed liberally with references to art and contemporary life.

I find that experimenting with forms that are not entirely designed in advance is a good way to generate ideas and techniques that can be consciously incorporated in later work.
At the time of writing I continue to work with fired and glazed clay. My work is transforming itself by becoming larger through splitting it into many parts that make up groups or installations. I am developing some work which is much more subjective and less centred on imagery and wit. My glazing palette has at least doubled with the development of the Karparc installation.

I try to keep this website broadly up to date with what I am currently making.

Get Flash:
Some parts of this site (Flash archive) are built in Flash. If you can't see the animation on the right you need to download Flashplayer 6 or later to see them. Get Flash player

Got Flash:
If you can see the animation above right you already have the flash player and can continue.

Karparc

[Above] Karparc, an ongoing project made by many hands.
100+ glazed earthenware 'car' forms, h30mm max.
Image copyright S.Fell

Work in progress

Projects in progress now tend to be much bigger in that they have many component parts. The components are not particularly big but the overall idea can be. I recently took Karparc (shown above) out for it's first show at our open studios day. The work currently consists of about 100 small (length 5 to 6 cms) ceramic cars richly textured, coloured with slips and glazed with a wide range of new (to me) glaze recipes. The piece will continue and I hope to show it extensively and that it will grow in the process.

At the same event I also showed an installation where ceramic objects are linked by threads. I displayed them on a desk mixed in with my half tidied tools and equipment, as if they were an artwork in disguise. There were a few clues, three red silk strings joined the six component objects together across the miniature landscape of my work bench. It is interesting how simple it is to step outside the context of 'the white cube' (rooms stripped bare and painted white like a gallery) the main pitfall of this approach is the danger that the abscence of conventional cues (plinth, picture frame, bare white walls etc) leaves the work so well camouflaged that no one notices it is there - subtlety in the extreme.

Above:' I tried to make something ugly but failed repeatedly'
Six glazed earthenware items with integral plinths joined with silk threads, displayed on a cluttered desk.
Image copyright S.Fell

Mould Breaking

Black Dog publishing have featured some of my work in a book: 'Breaking the Mould:New Approaches to Ceramics'. The book features 60 makers & artists whose work 'is taking the medium forward into exciting new territory, blurring the boundaries between craft, design and fine art.'

site and contents copyright © simon fell 2008