About the Artwork

I make ceramics and draw, creating figures and structures that evoke personal and shared 21st century paradoxes. The work is broadly figurative. Ceramic works occupy an interesting and ambiguous place between art, craft and design, taking on different guises depending on how the work is conceived and how it is shown. This mobility makes the medium even more flexible than the raw material and more open to manipulation and conveying meaning. My work has a strong experimental aspect to it, whatever I plan the work may not conform to my original map, it tends to find its own way with its own physical and visual logic. This makes an unpredictable technique even more capricious and ideal in many ways as an art medium as it has an inbuilt tendency to randomise the resulting work.

Duality terra-cotta figures, bisque fired ceramic work in progress by Simon Fell

Terra-cotta figures by Simon Fell on a shelf

There is a constant struggle that goes on between control and letting go in both the conception and production of the artwork.

My work currently takes the form of still lives, vehicles, figures and hands. We have a rapidly changing relationship to the use of our hands and craft or ‘tacit’ (bodily know-how) skills in everyday life and work. Whatever skills that I use in handling the material and understanding how it works may show in the finished item but the work also has other content which is likely to overshadow the display of dexterity – both things are going on at the same time, and they are the qualities that make the work so engaging to produce.

A modified representation of Makers HeadRoom in session. This image of nine people in a Zoom session is modified in Photoshop to make the participants less recognisable and make the image more like a digital painting

Makers Headroom

MakersHeadRoom is a weekly online group conducted over Zoom. We work together as a group of individuals, to share our presence and our energy in a virtual space where we concentrate on making. The session is conducted without words but with microphones on. That way you can positively hear the presence of others.

There are two 1 hour sessions on a Monday starting at 3pm (BST) and continuing at 4pm until 5pm. MakersHeadRoom started in mid April 2022 and now meets weekly (with occasional breaks) sign up for the emails or see the Instagram feed for updates

Sign up

Sign up for any of my mailing lists and make your choice in the tick boxes in the form below:

 




 

Three mailing lists?

It will help me and you if I don’t send you stuff you are not interested in, so you can make a choice in the form above:

  1. MakersHeadRoom sessions are weekly online maker sessions. Join this list to get the email invites with the Zoom link
  2. Artworks by Simon Fell is the list to join if you want to keep in touch with my sculpture (and drawing) work
  3. Artists Insight meetings are one to one online sessions to help distinguish the myths and reality of an artistic practice for artists of any description

The Artists Space image, an abstracted image of connections and cores in watercolour

Artists Insight

Artists Insight is an opportunity for artists to meet with another artist and take an overview of the state of their practice in terms of personal meaning, long term aims, and job satisfaction and consider how they might progress. These sessions could transform your art practice simply by helping you use the information you already have about yourself and your work more effectively.

Restart blog

The Restart blog is a series of a dozen posts on the A-N (artists newsletter uk) site about the fundamental issues facing artists trying to establish and maintain a practice in the uk and includes my essential piece on The Creative Cycle and my reflections on drawing, persistence, learning, earning, being an artist, on being male in the 21st century.