Cove Park

In the summer of 2009 I was awarded a 3 month Scottish Arts Council craft residency at Cove Park. In my application I proposed to spend the time taking forward research I had begun on the ceramics MA course I had completed the previous year. The work produced on the course had been a series of pieces testing out various strategies for communicating in the ceramic medium and I wanted to use these to produce a body of work in a particular setting.

Gradually my focus at Cove Park became to harness the ideas connected to landscape and the pastoral: escape, isolation, stillness, tranquility. Things that in reality aren’t always provided when you get there, and then to translate these ideas in some way into ceramic objects. So I wanted to make reference to the outdoors bringing it inside for ease of access.

Going on frequent wanders and the occasional run, I began to notice all of the pockets of intervention in and around the CP landscape, the evidence and the debris of human activity, stuff that makes it not a wilderness; pipes, machinery, fences, vehicles, gates, paths and then me in my studio with my thoughts, my materials and tools.  Although I found myself gazing into the scenery, it is these things that became the foreground and it is these things that once translated into objects I felt would direct you to the landscape once more.

This quote from The Art of Travel by Alain De Botton which I was reading at the time, spells it out nicely:

“There is a purity both in the remembered and in the anticipated visions of a place: it is the place itself that is allowed to stand out”

So in a sense I was making ceramic souvenirs the objects were my way of representing those points where something stood out and became the foreground in a setting.