Introducing Sculptor Ceramicist Kevin Jenkins

Mainly working in clay Kevin finds wonderful new techniques to create elusive textures and finishes that draws your attention to look closer.

Torq

Stoneware Price £461

Kevin uses the colours and textures of clays to produce objects that are tactile and visually engaging. The idea of worn surfaces, or materials that may have a patina, may have been buried for an undefinable length of time or worn smooth and polished are all qualities I am developing. In torq the effects of marbling the clays help to evoke old rotten wood and ivory. I'm slowly developing the processes to control the relationship between vitrification in different materials to gain different results.

Artist Biography

I returned to ceramics after many years of not practicing it, as an antidote to designing objects for mass production with their carefully planned and perfected surfaces and forms. It was a move away from the computer screen to the act of direct making and in particular to the wide and peculiar attributes of certain types of 'mud' as a material. Therefore my work is contemplating the qualities of the clay material and the effects of stretching different techniques rather than applied pattern or decoration. It is largely experimental and influenced by Japanese principles of design which I feel are converging with the attitudes increasingly found in design in a post industrial western society. In the future objects will have more value found in their personal or cultural meaning, they may be less disposable, more breakable, mended, imperfect, changed in their purpose and certainly unmistakeable in their not being factory produced. What does this mean to the nature of future objects and the act or attitudes to making and aesthetics? That is my exploration. I hope people can relate to it.