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'
My studio is where ever I am...
Studio
Practice
British artist Natasha Mayo’s early fascination with the representation of the skin of the body has evolved into her treatment of the nude body as a canvas on which she transcribes images gleaned from the intimate context of her family life, informed by her role as mother and educator. Influenced by popular art, she expresses her internal vision as a narrative linked to contemporary folklore.
Dr Lori-Ann Touchette, 2024, “Figures” exhibition ICS Hungary
Family Folklore
Palimpsest: work created for ICS, Hungary 'Figurative Symposium'
After a few smaller pieces exploring surface (see developmental work below) i wanted to apply Hungarian folk art motif onto a larger scale figure, where the detail of layers would connect more with the properties of skin rather than ornamental decoration - looking at Sevres bisque ware, folk-art and in particular the qualities of Margit Kovács relief work, influenced the forms to become increasingly stylised, almost doll like, pulling the qualities of the body to a midway point between representation and expression, and closer to the fictitious properties of the surface now growing across it.
Whereas previous figurative work had explored surface properties to create the effect of something as if happening to a more highly rendered body, this fusion of realities between surface and form causes the work to occupy its own reality, evoke its own small world of experience. The next step will be to construct a surface dialogue between figures and extend the narrative potential of both.
Palimpsest was selected for the ceramic archive, International Ceramics Studio, Hungary
ICS developmental work
Pictoral Language
Playscape
Reverie
The Expression of Flesh and Skin
Correspondence between colours, textures and bodily states are extended through the way in which Mayo applies materials onto the body. The application of slip mimics the activity of the surface moving in response to the pressure of the body’s movement or bulk. Applied thinly and sparingly over both fleshy and stretched areas of skin, a rapid and vigorous action forces the brush hairs to separate and create light patchy marks over the buttocks or belly, giving the impression that the surface is breaking up a little under the stress – as if the pale upper layer can barely hold together – revealing a smoother, darker hue beneath.
COVID Folklore
Covid-19 defined a period of time in which the usual balance of work and life was interrupted. For some parent/artists, this meant their creative work became inseparably interwoven with their active concerns as a home schoolteacher, as well as a neighbour and a citizen. For many of their neighbours and wider communities, it meant they became more creative, witnessed in paintings of rainbows in nearly every window along every street. For a while, there persisted a new sociality, that interwove art and life, where crocheted scarves were threaded through fences and lampposts and our daily lives were encouraged by an almost protective state of reverie. As the balance tilts back, it is important to identify what was revealed by inhabiting that intervening space.
The Irreducible Forces of Home:
Ensemble Art Practices of Parent/Artists during Covid-19, in Creativity in a time of COVID Royal Anthropology Society and Folklore Institute
