Artists in Temporary Exhibition

My ceramics rekindle a forgotten, childlike sense of curiosity and delight. The scenes captured on the clay speak of historic grandeur and past traditions, whilst ooze a captivating and sometimes sinister undertone. Each piece has a story to tell, and tempts your imagination to assign a narrative.

The curiously odd ceramics radiate my preoccupation with historic houses for their excessive decoration, opulence, and obsessive natural history collections and specimens. Drawings of these elements are playfully translated onto the clay. Scale and setting is often distorted to keep the images fresh and stimulating. Visual depth is achieved through the many layers of colours, markings and transfers that are fired upon the ceramic surface. The resulting objects exert a rich and captivating presence that delights, intrigues and is sometimes haunting to the eye.

Customer Comments

 

Craig Fellows is an award-winning and successful textile designer with a passion for colour and illustration, combining his fine art talents with his love of fashion prints and textiles.
Using traditional, contemporary and digital printing techniques, Craig transforms his stunning illustrations into beautiful fashion and interior pieces. Each piece is design, made and hand-finished by Craig. Every piece in Craig’s collection is completely unique and can truly not be found on the high street. Craig's growing interest in the natural world and our relationship with it, forms the basis of his latest collection.
Craig graduated with a First Class Honours Degree in Fashion and during his studies his work was regularly exhibited and selected to represent his University in a number of competitions, including Clothes Show Live and
New Designers and Graduate Fashion Week; where his collection was shown in the Gala show for the Zandra Rhodes Textile Award. Craig has received several industry awards, such as the Society of Dyers and Colourists Award, in recognition of his distinct and fresh use of colour, and the Leigh Cooke Colour in Design Award. With strong links with fashion, Craig has been able to work on exciting live projects with the British Leather Council, Drapers and Textile Lecture Days alongside Zandra Rhodes.
With all this already under his belt, it’s not surprising that Craig Fellows is considered 'one to watch' by VOGUE.com.

 

Recent work (freestanding and wall mounted objects) explores themes of authenticity and display within the natural history collection. Collections such as the D’Arcy Thompson Zoology Museum, Dundee, offer a survey of natural history and the evolution of animal species. In addition they provide insights into how animals were viewed, collected, preserved and used for study or display over the last century or so. The image of an animal is potentially evocative, loaded with multiple meanings. I am interested in their transformation; they have become representations, symbols, altered versions of their former selves. They are fixed in time; frozen into a chosen pose that often allude to their original context, their display cabinets a new setting. Images are reduced to silhouettes, negative spaces or are partly (digitally) de-constructed and are permanently framed by the 'boxes'. The cut out and mono-printed silhouettes are developed from the photographs; retaining and replicating the compositions as originally seen. Like the animals themselves, the form of the represented animals is fixed and static. The photographs are translucent, with sections removed, revealing the layers of colour and text underneath. Much of the text is taken from D’Arcy Thompson’s On Growth and Form. Although rendered permanently onto the surface, the animals are seemingly fragile and ephemeral. Some of the animals depicted are now extinct; their stuffed remains a reminder of the importance of preserving species.
There are multiple layers and processes in the work. Earthenware forms are built by hand with silhouettes cut out of selected pieces. Layers of coloured slip are brushed on, then mono-printing and screen-printing are used to apply layers of text and/or image. Commercial glazes are used, and transfers are applied to the fired glaze. Photographs, drawings and text are manipulated in Photoshop to be made into transfers.

 

Sketch recordings from the 2012 Draycott Arts & Gardens Festival

 

"My work is concerned with collage and the immediacy of spontaneous drawing. I’m fascinated by handwriting, children’s scribbles and telephone doodles and I strive to maintain this kind of spontaneity in my own work. Pasted found notes or manuscripts are occasionally employed because of my anthropological interest towards mark making. Collecting printed and handwritten ephemera is an important part of my creative process and this often dictates the subject matter.
Obsessive mark making, spontaneity, accident and embracing the 'naive line ', are all continual themes in my work. This playful approach allows me to explore the endless possibilities of composition, a nod towards my interest in the formalities of constructivism and the Russian Avante-Garde.
Snippets of photographic imagery and text are surrounded by hand made marks and line drawing suggesting a personal response to stories and narrative. These ‘drawing collages’ are best compared to the pages in a book, constructed from detailed marks and materials imploring a need to be held and viewed intimately.

This approach is repeated in sculptural form, Embalmed in what was once readily to hand, the figurines are shrines to societies short-lived fancies and disposable items.
Touched by another’s hand, the objects transcend their material nature and a narrative appears. I decorate and wrap the figurines like mummies and then place them on book pillars to elevate them. An ornamental end to the books, magazines, catalogues and receipts which are quickly being replaced by the digital."

 

"Themes for my work derive from character observation. The ceramic figures aspire to embody interaction and memories, as well as an exploration of habit, ritual and social identity.
Within my ceramics I aim to create a texture of movement within the rigid form, bestowing the characters an artificial life to the observer. The work aims to provide both amusement and personal reflection whilst playing alongside societies darker undertones.
Within a historical or cultural context, where the figurine has embodied a certain spiritual link to a subject, my figurative artefacts pay homage to a forgotten, but non-the less present heritage within UK culture.

Jon Williams graduated from Wolverhampton University in 2000 with a 1st class honours degree and award for Excellence in Ceramics. He has since built his reputation teaching and exhibiting throughout the UK and at international ceramics festivals in China and Japan. In 2012 he will begin his MA studies at The Royal College of Art, London"

 

I work mainly in embroidered textiles, producing 3D and 2D works that can be dark and subversive but are also often playful and quirky. I tell stories with my objects, incorporating found objects, ephemera and handwriting. It is important to me that people are intrigued, engaged and encouraged to tell their own tales.

 

Since graduating from University I’ve continued to develop my work and learn new skills. It’s important to me that I can utilise the skills I’ve been taught but like most artists find it challenging to pursue that end goal of making a living from what we create, especially when work and life take over.

For the last couple of years I wanted to take a step back from
producing my own work to do something which I’d never done before, I decided to concentrate on running workshops within NHS trusts,
which involved working with service users of all ages and
abilities to create work for their units as well as exhibitions within their communities. These workshops taught me so much
and helped me enormously to develop my own practice.

Since completing the workshops I’ve returned to my studio and
am developing the ideas I shelved a couple of years ago. I’ve finally started to create a collection of work which encompasses both of my passions – printmaking and collecting. The ‘Cabinet of Curiosities’ is a new, early collection of prints and other items which are inspired by Anatomy, Botany, Entomology, and Ornithology. Each one is an exploration of imagery and technique.
Each of the subjects are very much works in progress, and are
developing all the time.

 

My work deals with human impact upon landscape and habitat. 

I live in a post-industrial landscape where the scars left by coal mining and steel making are still apparent but gradually fading from and from memory. I reflect upon this process of destruction and recovery by rusting and burning my materials. The action of fire and water upon iron and tin create fragile surfaces on which to work. Burnt coal, wood and paper mixed with gum arabic provide a palette of primitive colours and candle smoke makes shadows. These are dirty substances, sometimes noxious and difficult to work with, but beautiful and evocative too.

I became interested in moths when the British Library asked me to develop a body of work in response to the Lindisfarne Gospels. Moths provided me with a mysterious and ephemeral subject and motif whose powdery wings and subtle markings lend themselves to interpretation in dust. On summer nights I capture their fleeting presences using a humane light trap, fixing their images with traces of ash and smoke.