Meet the Artist: Kate McMinnies
Ahead of our Artist Open Houses exhibition ‘Inherent Rhythms,’ we visited Kate’s studio to chat about wild clay, the beauty of the hedgerow, and why the South Downs is such an inspiration for her.
Kate McMinnies, Time & Place, Sussex clay and Sussex oak.
Kate’s solo exhibition ‘Inherent Rhythms,’ is this year’s May exhibition at Artelium, coinciding with Artist Open Houses. Kate’s work explores physical manifestations of time. The artist questions how it feels and what it might look like, whilst she throws her sculptural ceramics. The organic shapes of her helix-like forms and undulating vessels are inspired by her surrounding landscape of the South Downs. The sweeping oscillations of its grand form, lie dominant and constant, yet it is also a harbour of natural flux and seasonal change.
The exhibition runs from the 3rd - 18th May, Thursday - Sunday, 12.00 - 17.00.
Consistent Flux III, Sussex clay & ash
Your work ‘explores the shape and feel of time itself’ can you expand upon the importance of time as a theme?
I’m interested in the notion of what “time” is: what it feels like, what it looks like, how do we understand it. All these questions lead my practice. Natural materials such as clay, wood and stone are holders of time, they contain layers of organic history: the rings of a tree, the strata of stone. This intersection between nature and time is especially integral; and, for me, nothing encapsulates this more than the South Downs.
I walk and cycle on the Downs every day and I notice small and large seasonal changes: it’s a timekeeper for me. The Downs are both consistent, their large undulating shape constantly present, but ever changing. The rhythms of the seasons play upon them, revealing themselves in small and large seasonal indicators.
Porcelain vessel with seed pods
For this exhibition you’ve been investigating the hedgerow, why has this been a source of inspiration for you?
I'm very interested in boundaries: where the inside and the outside begin and ends, the difference between our inner and outer worlds. We are all a different person when we step over the boundary of our front door than the unedited self, contained within the home. The permeability of our boundaries explores how much we let people in, how much of ourselves we show.
The hedgerow is a kind of boundary; if you look inside it, there is this other world: a sanctuary, a shelter, a home a food source. It is not, at all, just something to delineate field boundaries.
For this show, I’m looking at the hedgerow through the lens of time. I notice when the buds start coming out, when the hazel gets cut, when the catkins appear – these things are all indicators of time. People don’t tend to look at hedges, they look at the grad vista, so these little ecosystems are ignored. With the pieces for this show, I’m taking unnoticed materials, flecks of withered clematis flowers or a delicate wood-shaving and showing everyone how beautiful they are.
I have always been drawn to what’s around me, collecting natural elements as memories: acorns offered up by children’s hands, beach-pebbles stowed in pockets, these physical sections of place which have memories layered upon them. For this exhibition, I have collected fallen elements of hedgerow and incorporated them into both the hanging pieces and the vessels. The clay, whether porcelain or wild, is then in conversation with the natural element paired with it, creating a discussion of place and history. We, as people, don’t exist in a vacuum: we are influenced by relationships and environments. Similarly, an empty vessel tells a different story than one filled with seed pods.
Circadian Rhythm 4, wild clay, lichen & cow parsley
You’ve been working more and more with wild clay, collected around Sussex, why has this become so key to your practice?
It’s another connection with place. I source clay from different spots within the South Downs national park, so, to be making work about the land of the land, seems right. Wild clay holds stories of the past; the land it’s sourced from often has had many different uses: farmland, graveyards, gardens – it's been part of so many different lives and histories.
Where do get the clay from and how do you refine it?
I mostly take it from people I knows gardens, but I have been known to screech to a halt on my bike if I see that someone is having work done on their house that involves digging into the ground. I’ll just knock on their door, ask them if I can take a small amount of clay and then I make them a few pots with it to say thank you. I also source it from huge construction sites – there is a big problem with waste on building projects. They dig out huge amounts of clay that just get sent to landfill.
I recently took some clay from Pitfield farms and dug out sections in different places, discovering that the colours varied so much depending on where I dug. In some places it was a light sand colour and in others it was this rich red ochre. The colours of wild clay vary intensely across the downs, which is another reason I enjoy discovering and using it.
The process of refining the clay so I can throw with it, has a few steps. First, I have to cut it into small pieces and put it in the cellar to dry. Once dry, I bash it up to get rid of all the stones and debris. Then I soak it in water, sieve it, then sieve it again until it’s a slurry. Then I dry it again before I can throw with it. This process of refinement is important to ensure I create a smooth material free from lumps and debris.
Kate, in the studio, working on a vessel, a collection of ’circadian rhythms’ pieces in the background.
You historically have made work using porcelain, what’s the difference between the two materials?
The wild clay is so different to porcelain. Porcelain lends itself to delicate touch. It’s so fine to work with: like cream. In comparison to the wild clay, it is so pure and can be thrown very thin, so it plays with light and translucency in a very different way. It has a completely different language to wild clay, and I enjoy the interaction of both materials in this body of work: it creates a layered conversation.
Where has the desire to create hanging pieces come from?
I like that the pieces are aerated, so they’re not fixed. It’s not solidly plonked down with a bottom and a top, it’s in the round, it’s still alive: the viewer can move around it, observing how the light, shadows and layering of form changes at different viewpoints. Like the Downs, the hanging pieces are constant but ever changing, all at once. My pieces explore movement and change in one way or another, so keeping them dynamic is important.
Talk to me about where the idea for your ‘circadian rhythms’ vessels came from?
These pieces physically explore movement, as they are captured in a moment of being altered by gravity or an external force. I either nudge the pieces forcibly when they’re on the wheel or I drop them after they’ve been thrown, so their final form captures the movement that made them.
They arrived through thinking about circadian rhythms, how there are constant, cyclical changes in nature: tidal movements, moon cycles, the orbit around the sun. All these things are constant and repeated, but every ‘cycle’ is slightly different. In the same way, I have pinched the clay on the wheel to throw it out, creating cyclical rims that travel down each piece, so there is a constant circular pattern but one that isn’t perfect or symmetrical.
