Summer Picnic with Kate Malone MBE with an opportunity to share your work and receive valuable input from fellow members to further your practice.

Tickets can be booked from 1st June 2023 @ 8am

Description:

Our honorary ambassador Kate Malone MBE is inviting 50 London Potters members to have a picnic at Kent farmhouse to on the 15^th July. During the picnic, Kate would like attendees to take part in a critical analysis of work with each other. This is intended to be helpful for our own development from being open to listen to other’s perspectives on our work.

What you need to bring:

• Picnic blanket
• Your picnic lunch
• Optional (but we hope you would): please bring your work to take part in a ‘critical analysis’ conversation. This work could be a completed piece, work in progress e.g. glaze tests, designs, maquettes

Please see Kate’s intent of ‘critical analysis’ below:

Critical Analysis of Our Work Malone MBE

As an artist concerned primarily with the natural world but also other things as inspiration, (currently crystal formations, baskets and pine cones), I am constantly observing the nature around me.  I wonder at things in antique shops and peoples homes to try and filter the curves and surfaces that I like and don’t like, to see which proportions that I feel are balanced and beautiful and ones that don’t work for me personally. This isn’t criticising other people or things people have made at all, it is a matter of having a critical eye and all the time absorbing, thinking and responding in a deeply personal way. This becomes instinct and I feel that appraising the shape of a leaf or the curve of a stem can be stored into my subconscious memory bank, ready for the moment when I’ll draw upon those filtered judgements to make decisions while I’m inventing new forms and surfaces and while  making and glazing.

Of course, this constant analysis is not heavy duty criticism, but a pleasurable process, an enjoyable part of filtering the things that I think about and make. There is nothing worse than arriving at an exhibition where I’m showing some of my own work and wishing that I had just tweaked something a little bit more or maybe modelled something a little bit differently, made a lip or foot larger or smaller whilst the clay was wet…. of course that’s always the case and work is always an evolution building on the last piece that I’ve made, trying to improve or simply playing with change. This is common to all artists and is second nature to us.

As ambassador for London Potters. I would like to share this critical analysis with the members, we should not be shy to speak about our work, criticise it, and when we’re comfortable with other people perhaps discuss each other’s work. That doesn’t mean to say things are ‘bad’  it’s simply  a matter of opinion and everybody has different perspectives, which is to be enjoyed. One person might like a vase with a narrow neck, personally I love an open form that seems optimistic and is presenting its inside spirit to the outside world. This doesn’t mean to say a narrow neck is wrong, but talking about these things widens our learning and scope to improve.

It’s just a matter of our different opinions which we should enjoy, rejoice in, and share. Of course we must be sensitive with each other but at the same time not too sensitive or shy to discuss.

It’s for this reason that I’m holding a picnic in my garden in Kent on Saturday July 15 especially for London Potters –  to celebrate the fact that we are a group, to celebrate the fact that we are creative with clay and ceramics and perhaps also, for those interested to discuss things at a deeper level.