Gilles Le Corre
Contemporary Applied Arts is delighted to announce our exhibition Traces: Imagined Histories in Clay, Silver and Thread, running from 13th to 19th May as part of London Craft Week 2024.
From our ancient past to the modern day, people have always been drawn to leaving their mark in a landscape. We have laid down stones in memory, scratched names and scribbles into surfaces, collected memories of places we have been. Working across ceramics, textiles, and metal, all eight makers featured in Traces: Imagined Histories in Clay, Silver and Thread use materials as an intermediary for human relationships to place and memory.
Traversing London’s real and mythical histories, Vicki Ambery-Smith’s jewellery miniaturises icons of the city’s skyline, putting a whimsical spin on the familiar in gold and silver, while Ali Holloway’s days spent walking in London have inspired sculptural textile works which use natural plant dyes to explore how ancient Britons’ myths are intertwined in our modern shared histories. These trails and paths left across landscapes by journeys and human interventions are echoed in the spontaneous embellishments which snake around Ania Perkowska’s pebble burnished vessels, and in Gilles Le Corre’s stoneware plates, whose sgraffito surfaces conjure up both graphic modernist etchings and ancient stone carvings. In her tabletop sculptures, Gill Forsbrook draws upon the the forms of the built environment, hinting at the electric tension created in the relationshop between elements, from standing stones to skyscrapers.
Our ancient connection to materials is epitomised in the archetypal form of the ceramic vessel, transformed by Nancy Main into a series which explores porcelain as a container for human hopes and rituals, while the soft glow of Sasha Wardell’s porcelain lamps illuminates the gallery and turns the vessel upside down, pouring light onto the space. Retaining her characteristic connection to her native landscape, Hanna Salomonsson grapples with the legacy of Swedish folklore and female interconnectedness in a stoneware series inspired by medicinal plants whose use has been transmitted between generations of women in a feminine whisper network.
Weaving a winding path through materials and techniques, Traces: Imagined Histories in Clay, Silver and Thread presents exciting new bodies of work from both established and emerging makers. The exhibition is presented alongside a series of events, including workshops to try your hand at weaving with plant-dyed yarns, learn how to make floral sculptures from paper clay, and a talk by jeweller Vicki Ambery-Smith on how London’s skyline inspires her fine jewellery.
Featuring:
Vicki Ambery-Smith | Gill Forsbrook | Ali Holloway | Gilles Le Corre | Nancy Main | Ania Perkowska | Hanna Salomonsson | Sasha Wardell
