Russell Moreton

Bodies of Things

“For me, ceramics has gradually become a way of thinking through material, space and encounter.”

I work with clay through a process of making, looking and responding. Ideas about space, architecture, interiority and material relations run alongside this process, often discovered through the work rather than determined beforehand.

I work mainly with hand-built clay, constructing bodies from slabs and developing them through drawing, cutting, piercing, layering, painting and firing. The work moves between vessel, sculpture and architectural fragment, but these distinctions are never quite fixed. I am interested less in form as a resolved object than in the forces that gather through and around a body—pressure, resistance, movement, gravity, touch, fire and time.

These forces become registered through the material. Surfaces are layered and weathered; openings and perforations allow light and air to pass through; interiors become active spaces of relation. The ceramic body is not considered in isolation, but through its correspondence with other bodies—material, architectural, spatial, atmospheric and human.

Increasingly, ceramics has become a way of thinking through relationships between bodies of things: between surface and interior, enclosure and permeability, material and space. The work develops through these encounters, where making, looking and learning remain closely connected.

I studied Ceramics at Epsom School of Art and Design (1981–84).

https://www.anglianpotters.org.uk/members/russell-moreton/