Alchemy: Air & Fire by Pauline Rignall & Claire Allam

This joint exhibition comes from a 14 year friendship between the painter Pauline Rignall and the ceramicist Claire Allam. While starting from different points - the ethereal and atmospheric in Pauline’s paintings and the fire-won earthiness of Claire’s ceramics, their work compliments the other’s, forming a harmonious visual feast. 
Pauline Rignall
Pauline's work is rooted in drawing and a love of paint. Translucency, mark making and rhythm are essential elements in her work. She may start with a few marks on the canvas and see what unfolds and reveals itself as the painting mirrors back the flux of emerging forms.  Atmosphere and sensation are her primary focus allowing the embodiment of light onto the canvas. 
Turner, Matisse. Monet and Diebenkorn are significant influences in her work. 
Claire Allam
Claire's work in this exhibition is based on themes of fertility, the female and circularity. She feels a close connection with the 'real' world, with nature and its seasons, and fragmentary glimpses or remembrances of these are often the starting point for her work.
Claire uses a range of techniques and clays to best express her subject. Included in this exhibition are larger, hand built sculptures in a heavy cranked clay, thrown works in stoneware clay with expressive calligraphic-style marks using oxides, and porcelain, both thrown and slip cast. Her choice of colour is informed by the English landscape: rich earth tones, sea greens, blues and black with splashes of brighter colour and copper red - the hallmark colour of reduction firing.
Claire's work is often based on simple geometric forms. Here, the spherical and circular shapes contribute to the motif of fullness and fecundity. This is in contrast to her elongated, elegant forms, often narrow in base.
The firing process is integral to the look of a finished ceramic piece. Claire combines electric kiln work with more traditional reduction firings using gas, or wood kilns and pit firing, the latter being her preferred methods. Ultimately, she views her ceramic art as a collaboration - a tango-like interaction between artist and clay and the raw, elemental force of the flame.
"I am an intuitive and expressive artist. I like to interweave both abstract and figurative elements in my paintings. Imagination, the earth, the sky, the elements all feed into the inspiration that informs my work.
I have always been intrigued by dreams and myth which create the images that flow in and out of my paintings. I work quickly, but am constantly obliterating and reforming in the process of finding the poetics of the expression." Pauline Rignall
“I have made pots, drawn and painted for most of my life. An early memory is digging clay from a Cornish cliff with my father. I feel a keen sense of connection with the landscape and natural world and my work celebrates the movement and rhythms I find there.
Outdoor sketches, photographs and observation begin the process in which my paintings often inform my ceramic work. My choice of colours is British landscape informed - sea greens and greys, blue, rust, ochre and black, enlivened with copper reds.” Claire Allam
We are excited to welcome the joint exhibition of Pauline Rignall and Claire Allam.