Francesca Silverton
Location
Hertfordshire, UK
About
Francesca Silverton is a ceramic artist who uses ideas from the materiality of clay to tell stories about cultures. She makes closed form sculptures and textural surfaces to encourage the viewer to touch objects.
Her work draws on ideas from both science and craft to explore both the materiality of clay and our cultural understanding of the world around us.
She teaches workshops in Maths with Clay in London, and has been longlisted for a number of sculpture prizes including the Aesthetica Art Prize in 2023. She has exhibited widely in Europe and the UK including at the York National Gallery, and her work is in permanent exhibitions in Finland and sold in Linleys Gallery in London. She has published papers on Craft and the Origin of Geometry, drawing on her doctoral education in maths, and her Higher National Diploma in Ceramics.
Artist Statement
Curves in Clay: Material, Culture and the Human Touch
This paper explores ceramics and curves, and is an exploration of how the evidence of making by the human hand can distinguish and elevate ceramic objects.
We are all familiar with lines of geometry, but there are also curves in geometry, where soft shapes echoing human forms have a language, as seen in vessels by ceramic artists such as Magdalena Odundo and Felicity Aylieff where the use of clay allows us to see an elegant interplay between the organic and the structured.
I propose viewing geometry in ceramic form and surfaces through the lens of 3D geometric forms, to develop a theory that the liveliness and integrity of ceramic artwork comes from connecting the materiality of clay with the human hand.
I use images of sculptures made from various materials, including ceramics, to make this argument. The interplay between the material and the machine is also discussed, including references to 3D printing, and AI.
I argue that the connection between geometry and the human hand, which we see in ceramic vessels and sculpture, can inform how we think of form and surface as a part of our cultural
landscape.