Jude’s ceramic pieces have developed over the years in response to the powerful landscape around me, she mainly uses stoneware clay with her own glazes. Jude’s work embues the passage of time of the lands past inhabitants across the land, rather than a direct representation of the landscape, I create platters because they are innately human vessels for sharing food.
“The surfaces of the land are eroded by forces of climate and human intervention, but the substance of it remains constant and immutable. Traces of the past are scratched all over the hills, and remain in ruined form, as fading monuments to the communities who worked the land.”
Jude uses techniques in her clay work which reflect these processes. The pieces are hand formed by texturing and stretching. Sometimes by throwing, sometimes carving from solid lumps. Colours are achieved with oxides, slips and glazes but most of all by the firing processes and different clay bodies, fascinated by the pursuing of an idea and the unpredictability of process.
“I want the natural forms, colours and textures of the work to engage the viewer with a landscape beyond daily experience. As we advance, technologically, the surfaces we touch become increasingly synthetic and machine finished, my vessels are tactile, blemished and scarred, these incongruities are what makes them beautiful.”
“I feel that what challenges us now is the reality of nature – wild, uncomfortable, dirty, unpackaged, visceral experience.”
I had the unlikely pleasure of having one of my ceramic bowls inspire poet Hugh Ashton to write 5 Haiku Poems based on the Japanese Tea Ceremony. “These are linked verses in haiku form of a single poem, each representing one of the five senses, referencing aspects of the Japanese tea ceremony”
Sweet scent of dead leaves; the tea’s sharp aroma joins, tatamis’ damp smell.
Bright autumn sun throws, trees’ shadows on paper screens; nature comes inside.
Wind stirs leaves on path; water bubbles in kettle, as the whisk froths tea.
Holding this bowl, my fingers feel the imprints, of the potter’s hands.
A sweet chestnut cake; the bitterness of green tea; seasonal contrasts.
By Hugh Ashton