Images for Poetry

 Here's some work drying on top of my kiln, for a group show at Flow Gallery in the spring (oops and an odd tentacle). It's inspired by 'The Fatal Interview' by Edna St Vincent Millay. It's a very melodramatic epic (52 sonnets in all)  love poem published in the 1930's. I'll put a quote in but it might take me a while to choose one.....

Love is not all: it is not meat nor drink
Nor slumber nor a roof against the rain;
Nor yet a floating spar to men that sink
And rise and sink and rise and sink again;
Love cannot fill the thickened lung with breath,
Nor clean the blood, nor set the fractured bone;
Yet many a man is making friends with death
Even as I speak, for lack of love alone.
It may well be that in a difficult hour,
Pinned down by pain and moaning for release,
Or nagged by want past resolution's power,
I might be driven to sell your love for peace,
Or trade the memory of this night for food.
It may well be. I do not think I would.

(From "Fatal Interview" 1931)

Ink Drawings

I was in limbo between studios over the summer, trying to keep on top of emails and orders. While I was waiting to get back to clay, I started doing some drawing with pen and ink. I've been doing the drawings that I'd have liked to have done during the last weeks of making work at the RCA but I had to prioritize clay work over sketch book work.

This is a Salamander and an Iguana from the NHM Spirit Collection.

I've been looking at all the images of Giant Squid that I gathered over the past year,  and I've done a couple of interpretations of my own.

RCA Show

So after a nerve wracking 2 days hanging my show with my brother, it is up, and open to the public. The largest part of it is my finished Giant Squid mural. It uses a gently curved tile shape suggestive of the beautiful glashas bs specimen jars that I saw in the Natural History Museum Darwin Wing. My squid shows a free, more fragmented version. Hopefully vivid and slightly scary! It got a lovely mention on NOTCOT http://www.notcot.com/archives/2012/06/illustrations-by-sophie-alice.php - where this photo is from. My show is open until Sunday evening, but closed on Friday 29th June for the convocation ceremony in the Albert Hall. More detailed photos of my show will most definitely follow soon.

My brother Peter kindly took a day off work as a bookbinder (http://www.petewiltshire.co.uk/)to come and help hang my show, it would have been SO stressful if he hadn't been there. This is Peter with the paper template we used to work out which tile was which! The final piece was slightly larger than I'd realized, so there was only just enough wall space.

Darwins Octopus and New Tiles

Last week I was very lucky to be able to have a closer look at the Mollusc part of the spirit collection in the Darwin center at the Natural History Museum. My highlights were seeing this enormous beautiful squid beak, and the small pet octopus that belonged to Charles Darwin. I got some ideas for more tiles such as the one above, which will be part of my degree show that is going up this week!

Friedrich Welwitsch Figurine

This piece isn't yet fired, or quite finished. He is Friedrich Welwitsch (1806-72), who was an explorer and botanist. He collected thousands of plant and animal specimens in Angola before going to work in the Natural History Museum, London. The plant he is looking at here is called Welwitschia Mirabilisafter him, and it can live for up to 1,500 years!

New Figurine

This is Alfred Russel Wallace, who was a contemporary of Charles Darwin, and independently from Darwin proposed his own theory of evolution and natural selection, which prompted Darwin to get on and publish his. He'll hopefully be part of my collection of collectors in my show, if he makes it through the firings!

Dinosaur Dishes

 

These are my large Icthyosaur and Plesiosaur dishes, slip and stain, with sponging and scraffitto, made in 'studio white earthenware'. I made them after spending lots of time looking at 1950's textile designs like these...

The plate below is a dish I made to illustrate the spirit collection at the Natural History Museum, with a work in progress shot next to it. You can go on behind the scenes tours of the Darwin Center, and see where the specimens are stored (see NHM link).

  They're all kept in alcohol which preserves their DNA, but is constantly evaporating so has to be topped up continuously, all year round. The staff take it in turns. Specimens can be taken out of their jars and sent off for research. They can survive out of the jars for a couple of days while they're being used. There are massive jars jammed full of monkeys and snakes, and large tanks to hold the larger animals, like a Shetland pony.


The Giant Squid (Architeuthis) is also kept in the Darwin Wing. Its in a glass tank that was produced by the same people that make the tanks used by Damien Hirst.
I made some dishes to try and capture my personal impressions of the squid.....

These plates are around 45cm wide, but not large enough for what I have in mind for my show.....I've just found out I have over 3 meters to display my work in the final show, so watch this space!