One of the hardest parts of running a creative business and making work for a living is staying inspired. Giving yourself a break, allowing time to play, experiment and explore leads to new work. I am so lucky to have wonderful creatives in my life, friends with whom I can bounce ideas off and explore themes with. One of these wonderful people is Poet and Creator, Rose Gleeson. Together, last summer we embarked on a creative collaboration entitled “Turning Off The Waves”.
A shell collected while on holiday in Cornwall acted as a starting point; each created work and exchanged the pieces. Using the received piece as inspiration the pair then went about creating new work.
With exchanges happening every 2 weeks for a 3 month period, the past paced nature of the collaboration pushed each creative out of their comfort zone, encouraging them to adopt new methods, techniques and to move away from usual themes and ideas.
Unable to create ceramic pieces in the tight 2 week time slots, I turned mainly to stitch, collage and textile based techniques, incorporating “found” ceramic fragments, words, mark making and mono printing to create layered, intriguing pieces. From these initial raw ideas recurring imagery and textures have now been translated into ceramic fragments, plaques and tiles to emulate the original ideas while letting the work continue to evolve.
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