I have three of my artworks in a show that is opening on Saturday October 16th.
This is how the curator painter Sarah Shaw outlines the idea: The Warp and the Weft invites artists and makers working in any discipline to consider the structures, relationships and processes that shape their creative practice.
This is not a textile exhibition.
Rather, it offers a framework for thinking about how work comes into being; the processes and decisions that shape its arrival.
This may include the relationship between what is constant and what is mutable, what is inherited and what is discovered, the planned and the spontaneous. Any creative practice is shaped by a unique combination of influences, experiences, materials, habits, decisions and encounters.
It is formed through layers of personal history, cultural inheritance, relationships and place.”
The artworks I have in the show are as follows:
1. Tag
A maquette of an idea for a larger sculpture. This is the ceramic version of a tag – the graffiti that we see all over our public spaces where individuals have left their mark to indicate their presence to their piers and everyone else
2. Bendy House
A house shaped framework made of oval section extruded tubes. Each tube is curved. The surface of the work is painted with underglaze and there are spots of gilding scattered over the surface of the whole item.
3. Heart to heart
This work is all about connections, in this case tubes connecting chambers of the human heart. The surface painting and attachments are another reference to links between diverse entities.
Introduction to my work
Here is how Sarah Shaw introduced me to her followers on Instagram:
Warp & Weft text about my artwork:
Meet the artist: Simon Fell!
“@sfellartworks works across ceramics and drawing, creating objects and figures that often sit between the familiar and the strange. There is a sense of humour in the work, but also a serious interest in people, behaviour and the structures that shape our lives. He uses recognisable forms as a starting point, then shifts them just enough to make us look again.
His work is less about providing answers than creating a space for questions and different readings. That openness is central to his practice, and also connects to his wider work with The Glimmerists, where creativity becomes a way of thinking about resilience, possibility and how we respond to the world around us.
Within the warp and the weft, Simon’s work brings together the personal and the wider world; individual experience, social observation and the connections between them.”
My version
Here is how I described my contributions to The Warp and the Weft:
“All my artworks in this show are assembled from tubes. Since I acquired an extruder a couple of years ago tube forms have started to appear increasingly in my visual thinking. If anything the warp of my work consists of the ideas that inform what to make and the weft is how they are altered by the processes of making, solving the practical questions like how does this form resist gravity? There is a constant struggle that goes on between control and letting go in both the conception and production of the artwork. Whatever skills 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.”