Strathnaver Museum & Mackay Country Community Trust Moving Times & Museum Tales
The Earth Itself
Lorraine Robson – Museum Artist in Residence
Biography
“In a world where pressure is on instant results, dominated by commercialism and technology, I enjoy the meditative nature of allowing the form to evolve with handwork, imagination, and human labour, using the most primitive and natural materials available - the earth itself”.
Lorraine Robson makes beautiful, contemplative, hand-built ceramics paying homage to ancient skills while embracing contemporary influences. She creates intuitively, a fusion of ideas, drawing on a kaleidoscope of images and observations to make work with unique identity balanced between manufactured, machine made and organic references. Her ceramics, dictated by classic vessel forms, are not designed as functional. Coiling is her method of construction; slab and pinching for complex forms. Each vessel is fired a minimum of three times, the surface sanded and polished using diamond abrasives, then, silicon carbide is applied between each firing to reveal the beauty of naked clay.
Driven by ideas, sculptural qualities in Lorraine’s ceramics are of utmost importance. Her focus is on form rather than surface colour or pattern in order to capture imaginations. Glaze is used sparingly to highlight detail, deepen interior shadow or to emphasise subtleties of shape and form. Lorraine exhibits work in the UK and internationally and has work in private and public collections.
Lorraine’s Residency
I sought to spend time in the Strathnaver Museum and locality, making observations and meeting with people to share my artistic skills and to inform people about ancient hand-building clay construction techniques, inspired by The Museum’s Chealamay Beaker, from the Bronze Age. This also raised awareness of contemporary ceramic art practice. By examining and researching ancient vessels, with crude nail and thumb prints from the people that made them thousands of years ago I now question whether I need to remove all trace of human intervention from my own sculptural works. For that reason the vessel I made in response to the residency is unlike my usual output in that I have deliberately left some of the marks created by the build process. The build technique of coiling, sanding, scraping and diamond polishing is the same although I have employed a lighter touch. I found it quite difficult not to polish away dents and scratches that occurred naturally!
I finished my vessel, based on burial beaker variations I’d researched, with a lime wax polish and white slip interior. It would have been easy to use a thick white glaze to cover any blemishes. I resisted. I’d also learned that many beakers had a white inlay in their incised lines, thought to be ground animal bone. I wanted to produce a contemporary vessel joining modern practice with ancient, but a vessel with a ghost like appearance to pay homage to our Bronze Age ancestors and to leave something of myself in the marks and in my own nail prints as my own legacy.
During my initial visit I made careful observations of the Farr Stone taking lots of photos and charcoal rubbings of the relief carvings as well as visiting Caithness Horizons to view the Pictish stones on display there. Joanne Howdle later emailed me lots of info about the stones. I use photography as my ‘sketch book’ so it was another opportunity to explore their collection too, for future reference. Museum artefacts are an important feature in my own artistic practice.
I worked with children from Farr High School. The pupils were given a demonstration in pinch and coil building and were then given the opportunity to build their own. I also gave the senior pupils advice on portfolio prep and art as a career choice.
Visitors to the Halladale Roadshow were able to make pinch pots and tiles. I displayed my Coil Pottery Progression exhibit at The Roadshow. It is now the property of Strathnaver Museum as a teaching aid to inform visitors of the build process likely to have been used to create the Chealamay Beaker. I also delivered my contemporary diamond polished coiled Burial Beaker, gifted to the museum as my response piece to the residency.
As part of my research I spoke with an archaeologist and visited Caithness Horizons, Thurso, and the National Museum of Scotland, Edinburgh, to observe other similar beaker examples discovered from all over UK. It's interesting that most examples, regardless of origin location share similar pattern. I found out that concentric horizontal lines, a common feature, like the lines found round the collar of the Chealamay Beaker, were often made using twine wrapped round the pot when the clay was soft.
For this reason I decided to use string and clay with the Melvich Primary School children to make texture drawings. The children enjoyed rolling out slabs of clay, as if they were baking biscuits; then they arranged string and twine into patterns on the flat clay surface. These plaster discs could be used to create crayon drawings like the rubbings we'd discussed. The remaining clay slabs, with the string indentations, were then cut into discs, round clay tiles, and were fired in my kiln in West Lothian before returning them to the Strathnaver Museum for display.
