Landscape

Vessel-Landscape-Process

a personal insight into the work of David Roberts

2. Landscape

Landscape, art and nature, is the world that my ceramics refers to and are influenced by.  The natural world is reflected on a micro and macro level.  In some of my recent work, often in the same piece, I seek equivalents which resonate and echo with the eroded, geological quality of water worn pebbles and rocks together with the contours and traverses of dry stone walls cutting across the Pennine hills above my studio.

My vessels are not illustrative but a representation of this wonderful man made and fostered landscape.  Landscape and nature gives direction and orientation to my work.  The linear patterns on the vessel’s surface can be simultaneously a reference to rock strata and an abstract means of exploring and articulating the complex interweaving of parabolic curves that make up the form of a coil built vessel.  There is an equivalence between the way that a path or trail moves across the local hills and a tangential line exploring and defining the form of a pot.

In doing this I am trying to imbue my work with the same sense of presence and spirituality I get from walking in my local hills.  Similarly smoke lines can evoke botanical structure and growth pattern.

I am much impressed by the way certain painters invest gestural marks with layers of meaning and significance.  The way for example, the Jewish American painter, Barnett Newman’s placement of the zip on his canvases, serves both as an analogy and carrier of feelings and meanings surrounding concepts such as atonement and the resolution of opposites. Or the manner in which the drips, splashes and brush strokes on John Virtues massive work inform and enhance our perception of landscape. In a similar way I see the smoke marks and patterns derived from Raku firing having a potential for meaning which goes beyond the decorative.