Heather Stone - Biography

I was born and raised in the West Country, its landscape and history is in my bones.

My background is in sculpture, most recently working with clay, making hand-built ceramic pieces.

I love the yielding plasticity of clay, the directness of process using bare hands and fingertips to create. Pushing, squeezing, pinching the cool gritty mud into a defined shape. Nails claw and scrape, palms caress into being.

I explore and make decisions as I build. The relatively slow process allows me to pursue and refine lines, edges and contours as I construct space and volume.

Sometimes quiet and intimate and other times bold and loud, primitive tools provide a vibrant, personal vocabulary of mark-making. Scratching, slashing and piercing creates a highly textured, expressive surface which together with scale invites physical interaction.

Each piece is hand-built and high-fired stoneware.  Depth and movement are created by painting, daubing, printing of slips, engobes, oxides and simple dry glazes. Through layering for a single glaze firing I seek to let go of selfconciousness, as each layer of glaze when applied covers the preceding layer and so is obscured during further applications, only later to be re-revealed once fired.

A rhythm of creation and destruction persists - of building up and taking away - all things weathered, broken, changed, dug up, ancient and earthy.

Sometimes there is a narrative……..text……….a fleeting glimpse of a starling….

I am passionate about the environment and its dereliction in our time…..