Patricia Shone - Hand Made and Raku Fired Ceramics

I took clay pressings from the shore at Broadford to make the textures of the pieces. The tea pot is from rocks quite high up on the shore, the cups from further down where small barnacles attach themselves to the rock. The red-brown stain of the tea pot is iron oxide collected from an algal bloom which grows in a local spring on the hill. The dark blue black glaze is from a mixture of cobalt and manganese oxides, the latter of which used to be mined a short distance from Broadford. The remains of the railway which carried the ore to be loaded onto boats can be seen from the spot where I took the pressings. And the handle of the pot is a piece driftwood from the shore.

July - September 2007

An exhibition of sculpture by eleven locally living artists in the coastal gardens of Armadale Castle, Isle of Skye.

The land and its climate are a constant challenge through which I have learnt to love its colours and forms, especially in the winter.
These three natural plinths appealed to the potter in me. To put such humane forms within a natural setting gives me great pleasure. Like standing on top of a hill and finding one’s place for a moment.
The title refers to the traditional three graces but actually I think it’s about just one.

Patricia was commissioned to make one of the 5 award pieces for the Taste of Local Food awards from the Skye & Lochalsh Food Link Group.

The Path to the Iron Well – a photographer’s response, by Terry Williams.

The artist’s communion with her local path has spawned this dark, damp slab that pales and curls at the edges, exposed like an island to its elements. It is an extraordinary – almost primeval – experience to watch, over several weeks, the growth of a landscape. I am struck by comparisons with Skye’s own birth. No volcanic upheavals or glacial grindings-down here. Simply a cool smoothing of clay-over-sand that becomes its own blank canvas in response to the air that – like the island’s sea – continuously probes a vulnerable coastline. Fissures open from the rim. They branch, extend and split again and again, into dried-out river deltas that creep slowly back to find their own source. Here is the tiny gape of a smiling wound, there a Cuillin ridge. A rift valley in the desert. Ravines, mountain ranges sharply peaked. Small islands in a narrow fjord. Shades of monochrome shift imperceptibly from week to week. I find myself greeting and bidding farewell to this infant landscape, which has become personal, animate, with its own identity. A small, inquisitive wellington boot leaves a shock of soft dimples among the sharp-edged cracking and rending. The landscape accommodates the intrusion. With each visit, I note how familiar shapes grow, stretch, meet each other and are transformed. Save for the smiling wound, which remains mysteriously unchanged. By the fourth week there is just a maze of dark channels intersecting pale, flat, jigsaw shapes. Ice floes, or lily pads. A slowly-shattered landscape. I think of how Skye might be, once the sea has finally done its work beyond our time. The artist walks a barefoot path through the floes. She seems to resume a conversation not yet complete.

Diary of Change - details

Click here for an overall view Diary of Change

Press Release

The press release below has more details about the thinking behind the work.

Click here for a press release about the exhibition from An Tuireann Arts Centre (.pdf file).

Calum's Road

Made from pressing clay into the textures
of a hill track which led to the 'iron well'.

Ostaig Pots, 14cm, 30cm 40cm, slab construction, 2005.
Made from clay pressings of a cross section of the old road at Ostaig, Isle of Skye,
when it was exposed during recent upgrading.

Black Lochs, slab constuction, 2005.
Formed from a pressing taking from part of the old road
by the Black Lochs in Sleat after a couple of years of disuse.

In 2004 Skye and Lochalsh Studio Trails held an exhibition at An Tuireann Arts Centre of work by local artists inspired by the story of Calum MacLeod and the road he built single-handedly over a period of 10 years. Threads from this story have persisted in my work ever since making the first piece.


Work in Progress	Cnoc an eorna ashet