Porthmeor Studios Residencies
Since our foundation in 1920, the Leach Pottery has strived to support artists, build local partnerships and champion ceramics. Now 100 years on, these values remain at the heart of our centenary celebrations. As part of our Leach 100 residency programme we are supporting 2 residencies at Porthmeor Studios for artist Nicola Singh and Eutectic, a collaborative group consisting of artists Anne-Laure Cano, Jim Gladwin and Julia Ellen Lancaster.
Based at the historically significant Porthmeor Studios nestled in the old town of St Ives, our residency artists will have the opportunity to investigate, explore and expand their practice in response to the Leach Pottery’s centenary and its positioning, geographically, conceptually & aesthetically.
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Images (left to right): Group Image, Image Credit: Monwar Hussain, Anne-Laure Cano ‘Fading Whisper’, Jim Gladwin, Julia Ellen Lancaster ‘Aridity’ 2019.
Eutectic
Residency: December 2020
Artist Statement
Recognising their own individual practices, which are based in the ethics of art, design and craft, Anne-Laure Cano, Jim Gladwin and Julia Ellen Lancaster come together as ‘Eutectic’ to support and share ideas of what contemporary ceramic practice can be and extend the boundaries of clay.
Lancaster describes her work as resulting from the ‘need to agitate clay driven by a quest for future resolution’. Guided by its haptic qualities, her work endeavours to embrace the human touch, largely intuitively. The resulting works draw on the impact of visual stimulation from the observation of architecture, objects and people and the desire to hold onto them or immortalise their existence to present to a future imagined generation, where objects no longer exist.
Gladwin’s work is grounded in a pure understanding of the material, its qualities, its weight, its colour, its temperature. His accumulated knowledge of materials and processes influences his own practice, whilst rejecting the temptation to make objects that ‘fit’ into a genre of craft, choosing instead to make pieces that demonstrate an ability to pair-down, again and again, resulting in sculptures that challenge the viewer to notice the unnoticed.
Cano’s ceramic practice is influenced by a forensic enquiry of materials, both found and reinvented. The sculptures Cano makes through a process of collecting, breaking, reassembling and immortalising, bear the marks and traces of a previous existence effected by human identities. They reflect the subject of exile, loss, abandonment and collective memory, drawing on Cano’s personal experience of displacement and the silent narratives of the past in order to find a voice in the present.
The Leach 100 Residency offers the space and time to work collaboratively, for the first time, in a neutral space, shedding the familiarity of individual practice. Using the notion of ‘Trace’, Eutectic will reflect on the legacy of makers and how much or how little they knowingly leave behind. Through exploration, hand making, testing and looking Cano, Gladwin and Lancaster aim to develop a collaborative visual language informed by the Leach Museum as an archive, and artists who have previously occupied Studio 5, Porthmeor Studios. Using clay, sourced locally, Eutectic will explore clay as a medium to document the notion of ‘Trace’. The residency will provide a valuable opportunity to focus and grow the artists’ practice.
Learn more about Eutectic on our blog.
Artist Biographies
Julia Ellen Lancaster ‘Bare Bones 4’, 2020. Image credit: Monwar Hussain
Julia Ellen Lancaster gained an MA at the Royal College of Art. Largely self-taught, her work with ceramics began as an expansion of her practice. The properties of clay, its immediacy, fallibility and unpredictability mirrored a desire to re-connect with the real world. She went on to study ceramics at City Lit, London. With a Fine Art background, past projects include ‘Micro Museum’ 2018, at Youkobo Arts Space, Tokyo, where residents of the surrounding community were invited to exhibit and narrate handmade craft objects of personal significance in a purpose designed space.
More recently ‘Lost & Found’ 2020, a solo exhibition at Poplar Union Gallery, London, incorporates 32 ceramic works inserted into an imaginary archive that serves as the depository for objects with no known purpose, continuing a theme of ‘future museums’.
Alongside her practice, Lancaster headed up the Residency & Awards Programme of Acme Studios, until 2017 and was responsible for managing two London based galleries. She currently runs a community ceramic project in East London, providing a platform for individuals underrepresented in the arts, to participate both as producers and audiences.
Jim Gladwin
Jim Gladwin gained a PGDip in Ceramics at Goldsmiths College, London and took MPhil studies at the Royal College of Art. A highly experienced ceramics practitioner and teacher having developed and taught on nationally recognised ceramics degree and Postgraduate courses; Camberwell School of Art, Goldsmiths College and Loughborough University. His ceramic sculptural work has been exhibited widely through both solo and group shows across the UK, including Limoncello Gallery, London, Wysing Arts Centre, Cambridge and South London Gallery.
Gladwin has been Tutor Coordinator at City Lit for over 6 Years and heads up the Ceramic department.
Anne-Laure Cano ‘Rubbles’
Anne-Laure Cano gained a Ceramics Diploma at City Lit, London. Prior to this she gained an MA in visual anthropology and cultural studies at Michel de Montaigne University, Bordeaux – France.
Selected for the Ceramic Art Andenne Triennial 2021, Cano has additionally shown at the Royal Birmingham Society of Artists 2020, The Bath Society of Artists 2020, the One Year In, New Designers 2019 exhibition, new Ashgate Gallery in Farnham, Cockpit Arts, London, Bluecoat Display Centre, Liverpool in 2018 and as part of the Venice Vending Machine - Edition 5, ‘The Artist Within, Branching Out’ - in the context of the 57th Venice Biennale 2017.
She has worked for over ten years in the arts and cultural sector including the international organization Alliance Française and the annual event London Craft Week celebrating British and international arts and crafts. Cano previously worked at the Crafts Council, where she coordinated the nationally recognised talent development programme Hothouse.
Images (left to right): ‘Don’t Look So Sad’ (2020), Image Credit: Isobel Lutz Smith. ‘Love Lane’ (2019), Image Credit: Jules Lister. ‘Sticky Weeds’ (2019), Image Credit: Sarah Boutell
Nicola Singh
Residency: 2021 (Date TBC)
Artist Statement
Singh is currently exploring improvisation with movement and language for live performance and for writing. She uses the practice to create moments of individual and collective reflection and resistance - towards a kind of body-mind-freedom - and as part of methods for institutional critique.
For the Leach Residency she will deepen her practice in improvisation and explore ceramics as a speculative and reflective tool for this process.
Artist Biography
Nicola Singh’s practice encompasses solo and collaborative performance, film, photography and sculptural installation. Her approach is rooted in performance and she extends ideas of liveness to her visual art, pedagogic and research practices.
She creates work in response to contexts of location, place, encounter and dialogue, and via a critical engagement with contemporary art's relationship to race and feminism.
Forthcoming projects include a residency at La Bonne Women and Girls Centre (Barcelona, Spain) and a presentation of new work at XARKIS Festival (Polystipos, Cyprus) as part of a programme with D6: Culture In Transit (Newcastle, UK).
Singh is Teaching Fellow in Fine Art for Leeds University and has a practice-based PhD from Northumbria University.