Space Kids

Primrose, John and Victoria. Hand Thrown Stoneware Vessels with slips, stains and engobes. I’ve been conferring with the lovely people at the National Portrait Gallery and they have very kindly given me the green light to work on a pottery project in which I bravely, nay cockily, restyle the divine paper silhouettes cut by Hubert Leslie in his studio on Brighton’s West Pier in the 20s and 30s. Hubert made tens of thousands of these portraits and they are deeply redolent of their time, his subjects are utterly real, we know them, but there is a subtle stylisation in his clarity of line, Wodehousian and Cluedo-esque. My thing. I wanted to avoid  pastiche, I hate the idea of making something which is meant to look from another period (or even my own period when I come to think about it), yet I’m intoxicated by these very evocative images. So I decided to pluck these characters from their day on the prom, and set them firmly back down, recast in new roles in an entirely different landscape, (albeit in the case of my first three subjects, one in the imaginative world of THEIR time). They could be on their way to a fancy dress parade, they may be dreaming of another life, or we may just have a multiverse situation going on here. We will most likely never know.