Caroline Fawkes About My Practice

Before I ever made a pot, I was experimenting with Super 8 film, while teaching art history and theory on a Fine Art degree course in London. It was the brilliance and permanence of the glazes on ancient pots and tiles in London museums that inspired me to start making objects myself. By this time I had started a new career as a psychotherapist, and no longer felt constrained by the more conceptual debates on contemporary art which I had engaged in as a teacher. Ceramic traditions opened up a new space for me, somewhere between craft and fine art as usually defined.

Eventually I decided that I wanted to do set up my own studio in order to explore ceramic processes full time. In 2003 I moved with my husband to an agricultural village in southern France, and now divide my time between France and London.

I like to feel free to move between simple classic shapes and more convoluted rococo forms. I don’t generally make preliminary sketches or maquettes. In the more sculptural work I start from a formal or structural idea, then try to follow the inherent logic of each piece as fluidly as I can, allowing the lines and planes to evolve, and playing with the contradictions thrown up by this process. Increasingly I feel the need to develop forms in relation to one another, opening up the possibility that they can be seen as expressive of aspects of human relationships.