After a Fine Art (Sculpture) degree at Reading University and an Art Teachers’ Certificate at Hornsey Collage of Art, I taught in schools, colleges and museums while developing my art practice and exhibiting, notably at Young Contemporaries at the Tate Gallery (now Tate Britain) and South Hill Park, Bracknell. In 1980, I took up an academic post in the Department of Museum Studies University of Leicester, becoming Head of Department, Professor and Director of the Research Centre for Museums and Galleries (RCMG). My books include Museums and the shaping of knowledge, Museums and the interpretation of visual culture, and Museums and education: purpose, pedagogy, performance.
During the 1980s, I established a ceramic sculpture studio in the Department of Adult Education, taught there part-time, and developed an approach to ceramic sculpture that forms the basis for my current work. Leaving the university in 2008 and moving to North Devon has enabled me to develop my art practice.
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My art work has two strands - ceramic sculpture and pastel drawings. Both are inspired by my garden, the landscape, natural organic forms and life studies. My sculptures include abstract heads, small figures and a series I call ‘Fruiting Bodies’- pieces that focus on the tension between fecund self-containment and explosive organic growth. I use a heavily grogged clay which enables me to build freely using a mixed coiling and pinching technique. Pieces are often made in several parts, but generally, though not always, end up joined together. I use glaze as though it were paint, combined with coloured slips and stains. I don’t want an overall shiny surface.
The pastel drawings develop from photos of the garden which I use to produce a collage on which the drawings are based. I am interested in the joyful and unpredictable combinations of colour and line that occur in a richly planted cottage-style flowerbed, and in the visual relationships between layers/depths and surface pattern. Made across the winter months, these drawings remind me of summer and evoke a sense of delicate movement and warm serenity.
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