There is a particular quality of silence in an empty room, especially a family home when the door slams loudly and voices dissipate along the street. It is as if the air exhales, released from its constant disruption, constant churning by children running up the stairs and through doorways. For a moment, it is given reprieve to settle into the spaces left behind.
Material Presence 2018
May 2019
Ceramics Art and Perception: article 'Pacing the Perimeter'
May 2019
Ceramics Art and Perception: article 'Pacing the Perimeter'
Latest News: NEW RESEARCH
2021 -
Flight Lines: Defining an Accumulative Practice: Reflection on the Life of Gwen John (Study in Response to the Collection at NMW)
This R&D project will explore relationships between Gwen John’s paintings and the wider commentary of her personal letters. Collaborating with the NMW to generate a series of podcasts exploring approaches that integrate the practice and life of the artist.
This will inform equivalent models, captured through fly on the wall documentary, testing ways to archive the social experiences of a family, to generate ceramic figurative work as a cultural expression of ‘family life’ in the C21.
2021 -
In recent years there has been increase in ceramic practice that moves between disciplines dynamically pulling the techniques, approach, themes arising from one to inform the other. Such practice builds on Jenni Sorkin’s ‘Live Form’ - instances where pedagogy / community / performance and ecology of practice are given priority over more conventional and often monologic practice.
There is another approach arising from this interdisciplinary turn I want to give particular focus, it moves beyond the excitement of finding equivalents between fields and begins to more concertedly assert overlap between arts practice and life.
‘Flight Lines’ seeks to identify the dynamic of ‘cumulative practice’, a way of creating that arises from the interaction of a number of forces, a common negotiation of women artists but one not specifically identified and championed as a strength in creative terms. Here creativity weaves in and out of the studio and ‘life as it is lived’.
2023
Flightlines: Conversations in Clay, a collaboration with Dr CJ O'Neill explores the extraordinary practices that can arise from the relationship between ceramic practice and life. Using non-hierarchical approaches such as oral histories, fostering networks, and devising podcasts, we gather conversations that give insight into creativity informed by the entanglement of multiple, interconnected demands – a common negotiation of women artists - and yet, models of creative practice curiously lacking in recognition for their ingenuity, resilience, and contribution in creative terms.
Co-Authors include: Sarah Christie, Phoebe Cummings, Helen Felcey, Claire Loder, Sam Lucas, Mandy Parslow,
2023
Flightlines: Conversations in Clay, a collaboration with Dr CJ O'Neill
Co-Authors include: Sarah Christie, Phoebe Cummings, Helen Felcey, Claire Loder, Sam Lucas, Mandy Parslow,
2021
Creativity during the Covid lockdown: Life and Renewal During the Pandemic - The Royal Anthropological Institute, and The Folklore Society
'Irreducible Forces of Home' explores how for many, the material-lore of ‘home’ lay dormant or unrecognised until lockdown, at which point its irreducible forces – a space containing memories, a shelter for day-dreaming - mobilised, tracing the ‘living history’ of families along pavements, parks and green spaces and contributing to a new, albeit temporary, sociality.
2020
Ceramic Art and Perception: article 'The Storyteller:
the Woven Narratives of Natalia Dias Ceramics'
2019
'The Socability of Clay' Ceramic Communities Conference funded by CoCA
May 2019
Ceramic Art and Perception: article
'Zoe Preece: Pacing the Perimeter'
September 2018
Re-stating Clay Conference:
Conversational approach to Skill Share
August 2018
CCQ: article 'Material Presence' Zoe Preece
November 2017
Ceramic Reader: article 'Civic Ceramics' Shifting
the centre of meaning
September 2018
CAID Conference: Civic Ceramics
October 2016
Beyond Borders- multidisciplinary event to raise
awareness of Assylum: exploring how creativity can
encourage discussion and awareness of issues too
politicized or complex to raise in other ways
01/02/16
Acceptance From St Fagans Museum of Welsh Life
to Continue 'Sensory Anthropology: a
Collaboration with Toril Brancher - R&D Grant
01/02/16
Collaboration with NMW and CSAD identifying
diverse frameworks through which to interpret
ceramic objects to create teaching resource and
database.
