Some innovative artists have come together to display their work in Bampton. Crabby Taylor lives and works in Chipping Norton. Her hand-built raku (Japanese pottery technique) and smoke-fired vessels are fired in the open air giving each piece unique smokey markings. Her elegant flattened raku fired black pot is influenced by Giacometti’s Head of a Boy, while her white porcelain form is inspired by the ‘Mountain’ pose in yoga.
All Harriet Coleridge’s porcelain and stoneware pots are both beautiful and useful like her Shell bottle, with its subtle ‘apricot blush’. Fired on its side in an anagama kiln, it leaves the imprint from the shelf on which it stood. Hand-built from impressed slabs her Long Boat with Shots is ideal for vodka, a delightful gift.
The landscape of Cornwall and Devon is the source of Susie Whimster’s art. Aerial photographs, maps, life beneath the surface, debris on beaches, derelict mining buildings all inform her prints and paintings. The oil on canvas picture Rosemullion, in shades of rust, coral and blue, suggests a grid or map, while her triptych is seen near the Lizard peninsula. Her hand coloured collograph monoprint of Island: stone and tyre, near St Ives, catches the orange colour of lichen.
The architect Marcolm Moor works at the Old Forge Pottery, a co-operative in Eynsham. Influenced by the potter Hans Coper his stoneware and porcelain clays are decorated with delicate lines and sgraffito scratched into the surface, reminiscent of Miro and Kandinsky, like his Tall black sgraffito bottle and his bold White Black line tripod. Taken by prehistoric vessels, Rowan Whimster uses overlapping strips and coils of clay that have been sculpted, beaten, scraped and impressed to make his stunning tactile bowls and jars that seem to have been recently excavated, like Wavy-lined grey bowl. Another of his unusual creations is Bronze black pierced jar, with its rugged, weathered look suggesting the Anglo-Saxon helmet found in Sutton Hoo. West Ox Arts Gallery, Town Hall, Market Square, Bampton. Until November 22.
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