Alice Walton: Selected works, 2021-2023
Mother, 2023
“As I look at this new important chapter in my life, as I prepare to become a mother for the first time, I look forward and back for inspiration for the new work for this show.
Firstly, I look at home. Nesting and nurture in the form of colour use; considering pigments to hand, to touch, to baby. The concern for the practical use of colour at a moment of vulnerability leads to monochromatic surfaces.
Secondly, I look further a field for inspiration as I look back at important times of travel and journey to past residencies. Scotland, which references islands, mapping and lichen, interrupting and creating breaks in rhythmic lineage. Iceland, which references the different clay choices and basalt sand accents. To India, which reference pattern and movement over the forms. This new body of work aims to bring together this shift of life, journey, place and time into a conclusive point of this period.”
Works exhibited at Make Hauser & Wirth’s 2023 summer exhibition in London, ‘Strange Friends’.
The Value In Things, 2022
“Alice Walton’s highly original ceramic sculptures result from a unique fusion of deeply felt personal experience and an idiosyncratic, experimental way of working. Her forms, created in moulds or hand-built, are inspired by fleeting encounters with man-made objects or architecture in both urban and rural environments, captured in drawings. Those things she has noticed on her daily walks, ephemeral sights – a cluster of leaves softening the bleakness of a stairwell, a bollard with snow on top, a broken park railing with rain drops glistening, an abandoned viaduct in a spring wood, sunlight on a hazel arch – provide the spur to a creative process intent on capturing the moment, what Walton refers to as “that snapshot in time”. First comes the sketch, and then the transformation into a three-dimensional object. But far from that being the end of the business, it is just the beginning. It is then that Walton begins the painstaking task of applying a skin of thin strips of extruded coloured porcelain to the surface ofthe form.
For Walton, this is, as she puts it, “a way of making a mark and replicating it.” This decorative skin is in fact a record of emotions, meditatively recaptured over days, as well as a means of recreating the movement of her daily walks in a static object, so that even after firing, the final work evokes all the vitality and contingency of life. In this sense, her multicoloured pieces are a three dimensional illustration of William Wordsworth’s definition of poetry: ‘It is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquillity’.”
Excerpt from ‘A New Door Opening’, an article by Emma Crichton-Miller written on the occasion of ‘The Value In Things’, an exhibition by Ting-Ying Gallery and Vessel Gallery at the Cromwell Palace in 2023.
Wedgwood Residency, 2021
At the 2019 British Ceramics Biennial, Alice Walton was awarded the ‘Fresh’ Wedgwood Prize for her use of coloured porcelain to create highly complex and multi-layered objects. During Walton’s residency with Wedgwood, she has developed a new range of works which re-imagine Wedgwood’s iconic shapes.
In 2021, Walton has visited Barlaston to research Wedgwood’s rich history through pattern books, mould stores, and the V&A Wedgwood Collection. Working alongside the talented workers on site within the factory and speaking about Wedgwood’s rich past has further influenced her works.
Walton uses a ‘ribboning’ decoration technique with these new blending tones, to mimic mapping. This new collection explores colour-blending with the use of Wedgwood’s traditional Jasper clay. Cutting, inverting and re-joining forms such as the Portland or Magnolia Vase has repurposed them into newly imagined architectural forms. This process references the object’s origin through colour, edge detail and pattern.
Captions
- Nurturing Routes, 2023, Porcelain and Grogged Stoneware, 50cm H x 30cm W x 30cm D. Photo credit Mark Robson
- Traced routes, 2023, Porcelain, 26cm x 18cm x 18cm. Photo credit Mark Robson
- Walking Together, 2023, Grogged Stoneware, Porcelain and Volcanic Sand, each measures 33cm H x 54cm W x 2.5cm D. Photo credit Mark Robson
- Fosse Ways, 2022, Porcelain, 35cm x 18cm x 29cm
- Morning Cirrus, 2022, Porcelain, 28cm x 28cm x 54cm
- Sowing Winter, 2021, Porcelain, 24cm x 24cm x 28cm
- Fosse Verdure, 2022, Porcelain, 26cm x 26cm x 50cm
- Folia Totem, 2021, Jasper Clay, 18cm x 18cm x 34cm. Photo credit Mark Robson
- Jasper Flute, 2021, Jasper Clay, 16cm x 14cm x 23cm. Photo credit Mark Robson
- Portland Ribbons, 2021, Jasper Clay, 21cm x 21cm x 29cm. Photo credit Mark Robson
- Primrose Ribbons, 2021, Jasper Clay, 20cm x 20cm x 22cm. Photo Credit Mark Robson
- Through Folia, 2021, Jasper Clay, 18cm x 18cm x 27cm. Photo credit Mark Robson
