Jenni Hicks

Jenni Hicks has a studio near Hampstead Heath, and spends a lot of time on the Quantocks in Somerset. She’s worked for the BBC and in publishing, and has also run her own cookery school. ‘Alchemies’ is Jenni’s second exhibition in London.

“As I watched fat rain-drops plop into my birdbath, I wondered if it would be possible to capture, in clay, the fluid upward explosion as the raindrops hit the water. Often I begin with an idea of what I’m going to make and, through the process of creating it, I arrive somewhere quite different.

Starting points, for me, tend to be elemental: the mist creeping up through the valley in the very early morning; the sudden bloom of funghi on tree trunks after a downpour. And these can be expressed as marks gashed and scored in the clay; or through a painterly quality in the use of multiple layers of slips or glazes; sometimes through the shape of the pot itself.

I make my work by coiling and hand-building stoneware clays, mostly using my fingers. A lot of my forms have a sculptural, abstract aspect, but I like my pieces to work as pots. At the moment I am caught up with the contrast between smooth, rotund or globular forms and something fissured or ruptured; a loss of control in contrast to something quite tightly contained.”

Meirion Harries

Meirion Harries was brought up in Penang, Malaysia and has lived and worked in Hong Kong and Japan. He has co-authored seven books – on twentieth-century British art, on modern music and opera, and two histories of Japan. For the last fifteen years he has been working as a photographer and filmmaker for a social enterprise that supports people with learning disabilities. ‘Alchemies’ is Meirion’s second exhibition in London.

“Photography for me has always meant sharing images that ‘ping’ in the mind’s eye. The moment of discovery of an ancient Arabic shape in a cloister in Florence, hard sunlight making sinister a box of children’s puppets, three friends in evening conversation on the water’s edge in Cadaqués, their positions exactly mirrored by three mooring buoys in the harbour behind them: these were sights that engaged me on a plane of heightened awareness.

My method of working is to capture a frame of light with the camera and then manipulate it in my digital darkroom – sometimes finishing with a print, sometimes doing further work on the image with toners and oils until the energy of the scene or the object has come alive.”​