Elizabeth Williams

A local sculptor and latterly potter who I have been inspired by is Eilean Eland. She has been experimenting with figures and has created a body of work creating female figures.
I was so inspired by her piece “And So?” at an exhibition in 2022 in Lyme Regis, that I wanted to try my hand at creating human figures for myself.

Inspiration: “And So?” by Eileen Eland

At the time in my life when I went to this exhibition and saw this piece, I was just starting to take my life into my own hands.
The defiance in this piece struck me straight away, I love the slight tilt of the head and strength of her posture.
Also, I hadn’t seen a representation of a woman like this with hair so messy. Although this may seem inconsequential, I am known by friends and family for my messy hair. Seeing myself represented in this way allowed me to identify with the piece and certainly inspired me to attempt to tell my story through sculpture.

Smoke Fired Woman

This was the first piece that I created following my decision to explore the human body.

Compared to my later pieces, it is quite naturalistic and I felt the curvaceous shape of the body exaggerated the stereotypical ‘ideal’ feminine figure.
The choice to carve into the figure, creating cracks and holes in the surface of the body, was made to reflect the demands on women in society. The phrase “life chips away at you” came to mind when carving away at the somewhat perfect figure I had created.

The Dancer

After my initial exploration into sculpture, I started to play with the geometry of the human figure and tried to simplify the structure of the human body. Elongating the curved legs into the torso and then emphasising the triangular shape of the shoulders and collar bone. Then using a simple sphere for the head and thin coils for the long, graceful arm.

I really enjoyed the journey of making this piece, I began by sketching a few designs and shapes in my sketchbook and seeing how I could use hand building techniques such as slab work and coiling to bring this to life.
Having not done much hand building before, this was a very labour intensive process and I had a huge learning curve in what was possible and the limits of the clay.

Isolation

Following on from The Dancer, I challenged myself to strip back the human body even further and somehow ended up with a piece that I felt had more expression.

With this figure, I removed most of the shape and left the figure as a triangular stand. A loose representation of a standing body. However, this shape, when personified, really looked as if it were someone with their shoulders tightly held into them. I sculpted the head to emphasise this, being slightly curved to represent a bowed head.
The slip design for the face gave this character such expression. Somewhat resembling the characters of Japanese Anime, particularly the works of Studio Ghibli.
After creating this piece, I felt a real sense of loneliness from this character – to the extent that when positioning this piece in relation to my other sculptures, I tend to face it away.

Headstrong

As my confidence grew with hand building, I was so proud to be able to make a piece of this size and stature (approximately 2ft tall, double the size of my previous sculptures). Headstrong really combines the curved form of The Dancer with the stripped back, simple design of Isolation.

Working on a larger piece meant that I needed to be able to streamline my making process somewhat so this piece relied far more on slab-work than the coiling I use to make The Dancer. This piece was absolutely one of the most difficult to construct but I felt so fulfilled being able to successfully build my figures on a larger scale.
Something I look to experiment with in the future is using different materials (metal, wood) to be able to further scale up the work I am able to create.

Kindred

The first three pieces of this collection were made using Crank Stoneware Clay. For Kindred, I had some Porcelain Paper Clay to experiment with and I think that this really brings the piece to life.
The clear contract between the bold colours and the white coil here is exactly what I was hoping it would be.

I really enjoyed focusing on the character of the faces for this piece, sculpting a basic outline of a face for each figure. I have found that it is definitely emotion that drives my work on these characters. I am looking forward to further exploring ways to create emotion.

Adapting my work using Kintsugi

After making my initial sculpture (Smoke Fired Woman), unfortunately, these was an incident where the piece was damage and cracked at the waist.

For a while, I have been interested in trying the technique of Kintsugi and I though the gold would look striking against the black and pink tones of the smoke firing.
In order to successfully repair the sculpture, I wanted to experiment on some other pieces first. The two pieces below were not made by me but I did repair them using Kintsugi to test out the technique.

After repairing these two pieces, I still feel confident that I would like to repair my Smoke Fired Woman using Kintsugi. The brown plate, I actually broke further to add a few extra cracks to as I liked the look so much.
From here, I would like to work out a way to make the gold Kintsugi flat against the pot surface prior to using it on my Smoke Fired Lady.