Emily Marston
In the latest instalment of our artist interview series, we chat to Oxfordshire-based potter, Emily Marston. Emily has been on a fascinating creative journey. We hear about her time working as a curator and presenting exhibitions on a boat on the Thames. She also tells us how she found ceramics, the part that photography plays in the making process and how she is constantly inspired by her surroundings.
How did your ceramics journey start?
I had taken pottery classes as a child and worked with clay a little at school but I’d never taken this any further until a few years ago, when a close friend invited me to join her in making some pots at her home and I was hooked immediately.
My practice grew organically, and I have mostly experimented, researched techniques and taught myself. I took a one-day course which was mainly throwing, which I loved, but I knew I could hand-build at home straightaway and was full of ideas. I helped out at Kina Gorska’s ceramics studio in Oxford. She has been so amazingly generous with her time and knowledge, and has helped my practice develop so much.
A period of illness when my eldest son was a toddler meant that I decided to pause and reset, and realised that I wanted to focus on making artwork again. I was excited to see how things would unfold while I worked around my young family, and initially while working with Creative Dementia Arts Network, too.
Can you tell us more about your making process?
Process is such an important part of my work. As soon as I started working in clay, I knew that I wanted to somehow put the colour into the body of the clay rather than work on the surface, and I discovered Nerikomi and Agateware techniques. (In Nerikomi, a design is created which extends through a block of clay. By slicing thin slabs off the block, the design can be used as a decoration. Agateware is created from mixing two different clay bodies of different colours to produce a marble effect.) After trying these processes, I started to work in a looser way, first with the leftover pieces of Nerikomi clay, then refining this by rolling my own sections of coloured clay.
Each piece starts with finding the right shade and percentage of pigment, which I then mix into the body of white clay. This is rolled thinly by hand, and slices are folded and layered onto a slab of clay. I have an idea of how the pattern will look when finished, but as the slab is rolled, the pattern will change depending on the pressure of the rolling pin, the thickness of the slab and the thickness and position of the colours, so each slab will always be different. I love this detachment from the final result, that there is an unknown between my part in it and the final piece.
I then either use a template or cut the shapes freehand, and construct the vases by hand. Before firing, the fronts of the vases are sanded to reveal a clearer pattern and a super smooth surface. Each vase is then fired twice to over 1200 degrees.
Shapes, abstract forms and your choice of colour are key to your work. Do you spend a lot of time experimenting with these different aspects?
I find that I’m always looking and photographing contrasting elements when I’m walking around in the day to day. I worked a lot in photography towards the end of my degree, and it plays a big role in how I experiment with ideas and connect them together. Often I’ll intuitively take photographs, and until I see them all together I don’t always see the relationship. I notice strong architectural lines contrasting against leaves and trees, flowers peeking out from behind walls, layers of different flowers and foliage. These things directly affect how the natural elements that can sit in the vases interact with the vases themselves.
In terms of experimenting, it can take a while from initially having an idea to finding the final shape that works visually. There were many iterations of the shape vases before finding something that just felt right to me. I often mix pigments together to find the right colour, also testing percentages of pigments. My colours are again led by nature and a love of being outside. My most recent black and green vases are informed by light and shadow on leaves, and blues often feature as I’m drawn to water and open skies.
Who are you inspired by?
I’m influenced by lots of people in my life – friends and family, as well as artists working sustainably, architects that fully embrace and work with nature. I tend to look outside my field for inspiration, and it’s usually when I’m outside or deep in the making process that ideas pop into my head.
You spent over 10 years curating and organising exhibitions. Can you tell us more about this period?
Initially, my partner and I found an empty shop space in Oxford City Centre and put on an exhibition as a way to provide more opportunities for early and mid-career artists to show work in the city. From there, a visitor to the exhibition offered us a pontoon on the river to use as an exhibition space, and it grew from there. We mostly used open calls at this stage, and it was a lot of fun to curate exhibitions around the intricacies of different spaces. We were offered more empty shop spaces (at the time, there was an initiative by the local council which favoured the spaces being occupied for a short period), and also went on to collaborate with local organisations like Modern Art Oxford and Oxford Castle to run events and residencies.
During this time, I met the director of a new arts centre opening in Oxford – Arts at Old Fire Station. The building it was going to be housed in was just starting to be renovated, and was the first of its kind to host an arts centre and Crisis Skylight centre under one roof. The opportunity came up for me to design and curate the gallery and shop for independent artists and makers within the Old Fire Station. Five months, and a huge and amazing learning curve later, we opened our doors to the public. Initially we worked with around 120 artists and makers in the shop, in addition to exhibitions changing at least monthly in the gallery, and residencies, too. It was a joy working with so many fantastic artists. The Old Fire Station is a wonderful hub of artistic activity, with values that really resonate with me.
What was the last exhibition you visited?
It was ‘On the Table’ at the Oxford Ceramics Gallery. It’s such a welcoming space, with beautiful work.
What are you working on next?
I always have a few projects going on in the background, and notebooks full of ideas. I’ve been working on some Kurinuki-inspired pieces for quite a while now. (Kurinuki is the traditional Japanese method of carving from a single block of clay.) It’s a very satisfying carving process and it creates such tactile objects so I’m planning to explore this further. I’m really interested in making my own colours from locally-sourced clay to use in my work, being able to link specific pieces of work to locations. I’m taking part in a workshop to learn more about this in the spring – so more to follow after that. Alongside this, some different shaped vases, plant pots for my growing love of house plants and kinetic sculptures are also on my list!
Photo credits Emily Marston and Mark Lord
