We are very pleased to invite you to visit Holly Stevenson’s solo show at Sid Motion Gallery. Holly spent a signifiant amount of time developing her ceramics practice in our studio with support of the coop team, and only recently moved on to run her own space. It is humbling for us to see how her practice thrives, and we are just delighted to have had this opportunity to work together.
Holly Stevenson (b. Norfolk, UK) makes fluid ceramic forms that explore Sigmund Freud’s favourite ashtray and last cigar as an analytical metaphor. Her sculptural ‘pots’ diligently embody the ashtray and cigar, as though they were two gendered male and female forms, as the artist reconfigures them into a clay language of her own. She graduated from Chelsea College of Art and Design Fine Art MA in 2011 with the generous help of the Stanley Picker Foundation. Her graduate degree show featured in The Creative Cities Collection, Beijing and The Catlin Guide. She was awarded the MFI Flat Time House Graduate Award, supported by the John Latham Foundation and has held a Guest Fellowship at UAL. Recently she was selected for the Mother Art Prize 2020, Cromwell Place, awarded a New Commission by Procreate Project funded by the Arts Council England and has shown work at Art Basel OVR | Portals. Holly Stevenson lives and works in London.
Exhibition open on Friday and Saturday afternoons, 1pm to 5pm
Holly Stevenson, Get Well Soon, 2019
Caroline Fisher Projects is delighted to present the work of ceramicists, Lydia Hardwick and Holly Stevenson
Lydia Hardwick
graduated from the Royal College of Art in 2013. Using surface
techniques, such as inlaying and slip decorating, her working methods
are meditative and intuitive, developed through an understanding of
materials gained over years of working with clay.
Hardwick
is drawn to patterns and motifs found within indigenous craft objects
and textiles, made by communities that attribute great expressive power
to visual things. Intrigued by the mysterious formal vocabulary of folk
geometry, she combines a myriad of making traditions with influences
from European art and design to produce work that aims to reconnect us
to an ancient appreciation of line, surface, tone and texture as
presences unto themselves.
At Caroline Fisher Projects,
traditional ceramic forms will be exhibited alongside abstract material
experiments. Pots, forms that are intrinsic to human creativity, adorned
with pattern will be placed throughout the space, alongside relief
palm-sized ‘swatches’ of clay arranged on the walls of the gallery. The
work will act as a series of meditations on the illusive nature of
meaning in visual things, reawakening personal experiences of place,
pattern and surface.
In 2015, Hardwick collaborated and exhibited with the Turner Prize winning group, Assemble
and showed in the Beazley ‘Designs of the Year’ exhibition at London’s
Design Museum. She is a qualified teacher, regularly delivering
workshops at the Royal Academy of Arts, Whitechapel Gallery and Camden
Arts Centre, London. In 2016 her work with Assemble was acquired by the V&A for their collection.
Holly Stevenson’s
ceramic practice is informed by an intense interest in psychoanalysis
and her sculpture explores how shape and colour might suggest embodied
narratives.
Her ongoing studio project entitled ‘Freud’s
Ashtray’ is inspired by Sigmund Freud’s favourite marble ashtray, still
to be found on his desk at the Freud Museum in Hampstead. The feminine
shaped ovular artefact equipped with the remains of a cylindrical
phallic cigar provide the two modest forms, the oval and the cylinder,
that the artist repeatedly recreates in clay as the foundation stones to
her work. Within the hand built bulging surreal forms meaning becomes
contained: Clay shapes up to take on characters, often adorned with
chains and flowers, so that Narcissus’ pools and Uncanny bouquets develop into brightly glazed ceramic compositions reflecting on tales of quirky bodies, femininity and sensuality.
Stevenson
started to work obsessively with clay in 2016, after a guest residency
in Sichuan, China. She graduated from the Chelsea College of Art and
Design MFA in 2011 with the generous help of the Stanley Picker
Foundation and is currently a resident artist in the Ceramics Studio
Co-op, London. Her work has been shown widely in the UK, Cubitt, The
Barbican, Zabludowicz Collection, Flat Time House, John Latham
Foundation and Gazelli Art House amongst others, as well as in China and
Italy.
Caroline Fisher Projects encourages artists working in clay and other media to realise innovative work that pushes the boundaries of these disciplines.
Over recent years there has been a questioning of the role of ceramic practice within art and craft.
Can a functional object also be an art work? What is the status of making in an art world increasingly obsessed with ideas? How will a new generation of artists learn about ceramic techniques now that there are so few higher level courses that focus on these? How can clay be combined with other media such as film, photography, performance, music and food?
The first floor space at 93a Upper St Giles’ Street, Norwich is an exhibition space but also hosts a ‘Clay Conversation’ on the first Friday of the month at 11am during exhibitions. All welcome to attend.
