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ARTS | CERAMICS
Bolts from the blue
Here are two tales of transformation, says Emma Clegg – firstly Mary Jane Evans’ journey from physiotherapist to ceramic artist and secondly her use of porcelain and paper in hommage to the Dorset landscape of her childhood
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t was like coming across a marine hideaway. Here were the colours and shapes of corroded and patinated metal, battered half spheres, layered three-dimensional lune forms, volcanic shards, rusty bolts stridently embellishing roughly hewn bowl forms, trailing strands of wire and jutting and grainy earth textures. The studio was stashed with the forms and creations of Mary-Jane Evans’ artistic career. There was also a towering wall of books and sketchbooks bursting and jostling within the confines of a set of shelves. A large, shiny circular open-top kiln in the corner – through which all Mary-Jane’s work passes – exuded latent energy, and a light haze of plaster powder lingered on surfaces and hung in the air like fairy dust. Mary-Jane was once a physiotherapist and worked in a community hospital for 18 years, so her transition to a three-dimensional artist as a mature student at the age of 49 was as dramatic as transitions come. Her interest in pottery started with an evening class, and then she won a prestigious City and Guilds competition in 1999 called Futures 100 where the prize was a bursary of £10,000, enabling Mary-Jane to buy a kiln and to take herself seriously as an artist. Her daughters both left home for university in 2001 and Mary-Jane packed her suitcases too, leaving behind her husband and her old life, and went on a new adventure to study Three Dimensional Design – Ceramics at The University for the Creative Arts in Farnham, Surrey, working in the evenings to fund her time there. The adventure worked because three years later she graduated with first class honours, after which she became artist in residence at Kingswood School in Bath for two years. “My job was to encourage the students, teach them to break the rules, be creative and take chances,” Mary-Jane explains.
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Paper porcelain clay, which I make myself, is a wonderful ... medium to work with
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They definitely found the right person for this role, because MaryJane is an artist who specialises in breaking the rules. “Pushing materials to extremes is fundamental to my work. I use exciting and unpredictable techniques combining porcelain, slate, corrosive materials and minerals, using the kiln as a time machine to scar and erode my pieces.” These ceramic sculptures have the textures and colours of the earth engrained within them, and appropriately so because it is the landscape of Mary-Jane’s Dorset birthplace that drives and charges her creations. “My work is inspired by landscape and particularly the Jurassic Coast, found objects, urban destruction, and architecture. My inspiration is also found in many unlikely places, a rusty piece of metal, a building, a painting, marks on a wall.” Mary-Jane whose studio is at Bath Artists’ Studios on the Upper Bristol Road, specialises in porcelain paper clay, a versatile technique LEFT, from top: Piece from Detritus series which was fired with the bolts and the oxides in the kiln, and Erosion, porcelain wall platter; OPPOSITE, from left: Afloat, the winner of the Pangolin Prize in 2016 and wall piece from the Coast series 48 TheBATHMagazine
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july 2021
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iSSue 221
