Foxes!

 Glazed and posed in the snow...will be making more of these!

Woodland Oddballs and Snow

Over Christmas I gave myself a holiday project to make animals, mainly as a change from scary deep sea creatures and dead animals in jars. I started off with cats and Foxes, and moved on to Racoons and Badgers. They're made with a pinch pot technique, which makes them pleasing to handle in a lumpy cute way.

The Racoons are especially odd. I've been firing them over the last couple of days, which keeps the studio lovely and warm, despite the snow outside. My brother's car has particularly lovely snow sculptures on the back, created by his roof rack, hand made by him at The Winchester Bindery...

Prints in Angel

 I've just taken part in an exhibition of prints right next to Angel Tube station in London. The location was really great, not least because walking around in the snow with framed prints is quite awkward! The venue was at Candid Arts, which has a great gallery space, spacious and airy. I'm hoping to exhibit the prints again soon.

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!