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Shirley Vauvelle
Ceramicist
An established decorative mixed media British maker, her practise has tended to produce playful component pieces combined with found materials. Assemblages inspired by creatures, birds and plants. Recently her work has become more abstract and larger in scale and concentrates more on form as a whole.
The work has evolved over a long period of time since her trip to the Atlas mountains in Morocco where she immersed herself in drawing the immense landscape. The sense of place in the valley besides being unlike anything else, also had an overwhelming sense of calm and a sense that we are a tiny dot in the universe, in nature. That nature, although it has the power to calm it also has the power to destruct. That’s the feeling that you can connect with in certain landscapes such as this one. The experience has lead hand built sculptures and assemblages in stoneware clay and found materials. Many of these pieces were created in lockdown in her studio near Scarborough in North Yorkshire. With the luxury of more time to appreciate peace and nature and give more thinking space to stages of development, it is very much reflected in how the pieces evolved. Shirley is sensitive to surface qualities and consideration of space and shape, more time to enable this has changed the way Shirley now works. She also has a playfulness in her work, in this collection each piece has an insert that conveys the feeling of the sense of place and emotion felt from the landscape observed. She wishes her pieces to be interactive by providing a selection of inserts which may be swapped around to change the mood of the piece, as well as the ones she intended for each sculpture.
The colour and textures are built up in layers sometimes with firings in the kiln going up to five times, using slips, underglazes and oxides. Shirley’s love of plants is reflected the use of the plant material she grows in her garden, applied intuitively to the surface, creating botanical pattern and texture. Or using them as part of the sculpture bringing nature and her work together.