I am writing this from my family home in the Yorkshire village of Denby Dale in the north of England. My parent’s house sits below the Denby Dale Viaduct, a stone-built rail bridge of twenty-one archways that span the width of the valley, carrying the train line between Sheffield and Huddersfield. This line used to carry me from Denby Dale to Batley College where I began my further education with a one-year Foundation in Art and Design. A diagnostic course that felt more like art boot camp, with tutors who spent their days developing ever more elaborate ways to challenge my thinking and introduce me to the myriad of specialisms that could be pursued to degree level.
After weeks of moving between workshops, from textiles, to painting, to sculpture, to graphic design, my turn in the ceramic department came round. My practice was led by tutor David Roberts, a potter who makes magnificent pots that marry powerful forms with complex surface drawings created using smoke and raku firing techniques. Little did I realize that I was being taught by one of the U.K.’s foremost ceramic artists and that this would be the start of a 30-year career working with clay.
One degree and a postgraduate diploma from Edinburgh College of Art later, I found myself choosing to make the capital of Scotland my home. A far cry from the rolling hills and textile mills of West Yorkshire, Edinburgh offered up a cultural experience, a creative community and access to highland hill walking that felt too compelling to resist.
Working as an artist is a scary business. It is precarious, personally exposing, the pathways to making a viable career are not always obvious and the landscape is constantly changing. Early on I forged a career supported by multiple part-time jobs. Wedding and celebration cake decorating was particularly fun, if problematic for my waistline. Craft gallery assistant was rewarding and expansive, allowing me to meet my heroes, develop my knowledge of the field and get to grips with the business of selling art.
In 2003 I had my first solo exhibition, Line & Form at The Scottish Gallery in Edinburgh. Two years later in 2005, I followed up with a second solo show, Surface & Shape. The work received some positive critical attention, and I was thrilled to see pieces acquired for the collections of the National Museum of Scotland, the Victoria and Albert Museum and the Fitzwilliam Museum. I divided my days between working from a studio space at Edinburgh Sculpture Workshop and teaching at Edinburgh College of Art. Sadly the ceramic department closed in 2007.
In February 2005 I undertook a two-week trip to Japan, to participate in a British Crafts Council exhibition, Surface, Texture, Shape, at Axis Gallery, Tokyo. Later that same year I left my teaching job at Edinburgh College of Art to take up an artist-in-residence post at Regents International School in the Chonburi region of Thailand. These were my first experiences visiting countries outside of Europe and North America. I encountered cultures where craft, making and material understanding were primary forms of creative expression; where craft and ornament were revered. These experiences were pivotal in setting me on a creative path that still defines my interests and output.
Today I work full time in a studio space at Abbeymount Studios, a dilapidated Victorian-era school building in Northeast Edinburgh. It is situated just above Holyrood Parliament and just beyond Calton Hill. The administrator’s office of this former school building has been my home for the last nine years. It has a small footprint, but the high ceilings of the building allow for a mezzanine space, splitting the studio over two floors. Downstairs it is messy with kilns and clay. Upstairs I have an office area, clean desk space and a comfy chair next to an overflowing bookcase. The studios are home to a variety of independent creatives working in textiles, illustration, painting, ceramics, fashion design, mosaic making and photography. We hold open studios twice a year, winter and summer, where visitors can take a behind-the-scenes look at the busy creative lives of all the studio holders.
My current work explores cultural histories of ornament and pattern through studio ceramics and installations in the built environment. Central to the work is an interest in pattern books as a means of documenting and disseminating languages of ornament, reflecting upon the ever-changing interpretations of ornamental motifs as they move between drawing and material form. The work I make sits between craft, design and sculpture, pulling on traditions and forms from each area to realize my ideas.
In August 2024 I presented Unfixing, a new body of work for a solo exhibition at &Gallery in Edinburgh. Exploring my changing relationship with ornamental motif and pattern, the work was a response both to personal events and a wider sense of living through a time of shifting perspectives and great uncertainty. As I write, the results of the American election are being reported.
The work I presented was first developed during a residency with the Hugo Burge Foundation in April 2023. No brief, no expectation, just time away from the routines and familiarity of my ceramic studio, in a peaceful rural setting in the Scottish Borders; a blank curved wall in the circular Tower Studio offered a space to think and breathe. A place to pin written thoughts on Post-it notes and sketches in pen, gouache and watercolor.
I felt safely held as uncertain, abstract, mediative explorations of pattern structures and color shifts began to emerge. Exploring the why of ornament and pattern, not from a historical perspective but through process and production. The pleasure, joy and magic of repeated gestures of mark-making, watching as motifs built up into whole surfaces, before breaking down into new configurations. Working intuitively and allowing the unique mistakes of my hand to play out across a drawing.
Back in my Edinburgh studio, drawings on paper were pushed into clay. Canvases of chocolate black stoneware, inscribed line, sprig molded relief and layers of matte vitreous slip. Wall-based works that sit on the point between two and three dimensions, reminding me of ideas from earlier bodies of work, Line & Form, Surface & Shape, exploring space and movement on a two-dimensional plane.
The color references were multiple. Lengthening days, fresh spring greens and unfolding seasonal flowers. Crewelwork embroidery, Minton tiles, Burmantofts vases and De Morgan chargers from the foundation’s collection. On paper, choices were made from the point of view of experimenting, exploring and looking. In clay, the decisions became more intuitive and elusive.
Of all the ways a human can spend their days, seeking out beauty and magic in materials feels vital and fragile, a huge privilege, a comfort and an act of slow defiance in the face of seismic changes.
♦♦♦
From Isabelle Fish | I am an ardent lover of bold colours, layered interiors, busy rooms, unexpected marriage of textures, styles and cultural references. I think that’s why I instantly fell in love with Frances’ work. How to resist the abundance of patterns, the criss-crossing of lines, the richness of glazes, the elegance of the shapes? There and then I decided to give in to the temptation and started acquiring her work. Every day it brings me joy.
I am writing this from my family home in the Yorkshire village of Denby Dale in the north of England. My parent’s house sits below the Denby Dale Viaduct, a stone-built rail bridge of twenty-one archways that span the width of the valley, carrying the train line between Sheffield and Huddersfield. This line used to carry me from Denby Dale to Batley College where I began my further education with a one-year Foundation in Art and Design. A diagnostic course that felt more like art boot camp, with tutors who spent their days developing ever more elaborate ways to challenge my thinking and introduce me to the myriad of specialisms that could be pursued to degree level.
After weeks of moving between workshops, from textiles, to painting, to sculpture, to graphic design, my turn in the ceramic department came round. My practice was led by tutor David Roberts, a potter who makes magnificent pots that marry powerful forms with complex surface drawings created using smoke and raku firing techniques. Little did I realize that I was being taught by one of the U.K.’s foremost ceramic artists and that this would be the start of a 30-year career working with clay.
One degree and a postgraduate diploma from Edinburgh College of Art later, I found myself choosing to make the capital of Scotland my home. A far cry from the rolling hills and textile mills of West Yorkshire, Edinburgh offered up a cultural experience, a creative community and access to highland hill walking that felt too compelling to resist.
Working as an artist is a scary business. It is precarious, personally exposing, the pathways to making a viable career are not always obvious and the landscape is constantly changing. Early on I forged a career supported by multiple part-time jobs. Wedding and celebration cake decorating was particularly fun, if problematic for my waistline. Craft gallery assistant was rewarding and expansive, allowing me to meet my heroes, develop my knowledge of the field and get to grips with the business of selling art.
In 2003 I had my first solo exhibition, Line & Form at The Scottish Gallery in Edinburgh. Two years later in 2005, I followed up with a second solo show, Surface & Shape. The work received some positive critical attention, and I was thrilled to see pieces acquired for the collections of the National Museum of Scotland, the Victoria and Albert Museum and the Fitzwilliam Museum. I divided my days between working from a studio space at Edinburgh Sculpture Workshop and teaching at Edinburgh College of Art. Sadly the ceramic department closed in 2007.
In February 2005 I undertook a two-week trip to Japan, to participate in a British Crafts Council exhibition, Surface, Texture, Shape, at Axis Gallery, Tokyo. Later that same year I left my teaching job at Edinburgh College of Art to take up an artist-in-residence post at Regents International School in the Chonburi region of Thailand. These were my first experiences visiting countries outside of Europe and North America. I encountered cultures where craft, making and material understanding were primary forms of creative expression; where craft and ornament were revered. These experiences were pivotal in setting me on a creative path that still defines my interests and output.
Today I work full time in a studio space at Abbeymount Studios, a dilapidated Victorian-era school building in Northeast Edinburgh. It is situated just above Holyrood Parliament and just beyond Calton Hill. The administrator’s office of this former school building has been my home for the last nine years. It has a small footprint, but the high ceilings of the building allow for a mezzanine space, splitting the studio over two floors. Downstairs it is messy with kilns and clay. Upstairs I have an office area, clean desk space and a comfy chair next to an overflowing bookcase. The studios are home to a variety of independent creatives working in textiles, illustration, painting, ceramics, fashion design, mosaic making and photography. We hold open studios twice a year, winter and summer, where visitors can take a behind-the-scenes look at the busy creative lives of all the studio holders.
My current work explores cultural histories of ornament and pattern through studio ceramics and installations in the built environment. Central to the work is an interest in pattern books as a means of documenting and disseminating languages of ornament, reflecting upon the ever-changing interpretations of ornamental motifs as they move between drawing and material form. The work I make sits between craft, design and sculpture, pulling on traditions and forms from each area to realize my ideas.
In August 2024 I presented Unfixing, a new body of work for a solo exhibition at &Gallery in Edinburgh. Exploring my changing relationship with ornamental motif and pattern, the work was a response both to personal events and a wider sense of living through a time of shifting perspectives and great uncertainty. As I write, the results of the American election are being reported.
The work I presented was first developed during a residency with the Hugo Burge Foundation in April 2023. No brief, no expectation, just time away from the routines and familiarity of my ceramic studio, in a peaceful rural setting in the Scottish Borders; a blank curved wall in the circular Tower Studio offered a space to think and breathe. A place to pin written thoughts on Post-it notes and sketches in pen, gouache and watercolor.
I felt safely held as uncertain, abstract, mediative explorations of pattern structures and color shifts began to emerge. Exploring the why of ornament and pattern, not from a historical perspective but through process and production. The pleasure, joy and magic of repeated gestures of mark-making, watching as motifs built up into whole surfaces, before breaking down into new configurations. Working intuitively and allowing the unique mistakes of my hand to play out across a drawing.
Back in my Edinburgh studio, drawings on paper were pushed into clay. Canvases of chocolate black stoneware, inscribed line, sprig molded relief and layers of matte vitreous slip. Wall-based works that sit on the point between two and three dimensions, reminding me of ideas from earlier bodies of work, Line & Form, Surface & Shape, exploring space and movement on a two-dimensional plane.
The color references were multiple. Lengthening days, fresh spring greens and unfolding seasonal flowers. Crewelwork embroidery, Minton tiles, Burmantofts vases and De Morgan chargers from the foundation’s collection. On paper, choices were made from the point of view of experimenting, exploring and looking. In clay, the decisions became more intuitive and elusive.
Of all the ways a human can spend their days, seeking out beauty and magic in materials feels vital and fragile, a huge privilege, a comfort and an act of slow defiance in the face of seismic changes.
♦♦♦
From Isabelle Fish | I am an ardent lover of bold colours, layered interiors, busy rooms, unexpected marriage of textures, styles and cultural references. I think that’s why I instantly fell in love with Frances’ work. How to resist the abundance of patterns, the criss-crossing of lines, the richness of glazes, the elegance of the shapes? There and then I decided to give in to the temptation and started acquiring her work. Every day it brings me joy.
