Florence Dwyer

The next artist in Ingleby’s series of Instalments is the Glasgow-based artist Florence Dwyer, whose new body of work has been made in response to the history and atmosphere of the gallery’s upstairs Feast Room.

Dwyer’s relationship with clay began in childhood, when her mother – an art teacher – would bring a portable potter’s wheel home during the school holidays, and set it up in the bathroom. Early experiments covered the tiled walls in clay and slip. This sense of play, central to Dwyer’s approach, has been combined with research-based methods to create works with character and resonance.

Her projects move back and forth between historical exploration and material experiments.  She looks at how things have been made, handled and enjoyed, and the ways clay can hold traces of domestic life, ritual and folklore. For this presentation her starting point was the gallery’s former life as The Glasite Meeting House, and particularly the ‘Feast Room’ where the elders would gather for a meal to break the all-day Sunday service, and where this presentation will be installed.

The small, bottle-like forms look back to pilgrim bottles carried by travellers to transport water, oil or soil from holy sites. There is a nod, too, to the room itself, to the hand carved bench backs and the subdued light that once filtered through the original brown glass onto the long wooden table.

Each begins as a plaster form turned on a whirler, before being moulded and slip cast. Dwyer then works on the surfaces and, shifting instinctively between precision and chance, pours or trails slip, uses stencils, scratches into the layers or simply allows layers of applied decoration to bleed and collide.  Every vessel has its own distinct character, the surface revealing one coloured layer beneath another. Together they form a sea of different colours and patterns, as they clash, correspond and keep one another company.