CENTRE FOR MODERN & CONTEMPORARY
STUDIO CERAMICS AND ORIGINAL ARTWORK

Sian is a West Sussex ceramicist and landscape painter. Brought up in Canada and Italy until her parents moved to the South Downs, this is where she now lives and works, in a quiet time-warp near its northern boundary. Her workspace is an old agricultural barn surrounded by ancient fields with grazing sheep, goats, and cattle. When weather permits, Sian throws open the huge wooden doors to flood the space with light, and revealing long views over the landscape. It is the qualities of this landscape that she seeks to transpose into and onto her vessels and her paintings.

She tries to capture what feels just beyond capturing; the sense of infinity, permanence and space, and to convey that sense within a shape of clay, or on a canvas. Sian works in response to the open Sussex skies and the timeless downland vistas uninterrupted by any building. When she works with clay, she is always aware that it is powdered earth and rock, and that when her vessels are fired, the mineral structure itself is changed permanently, so they are to her a new reflection of the permanence of the Earth. She is excited by this concept. The Earth is also the essence of her paintings as well as their subject-matter, as her landscapes are painted using traditional oil paints whose pigments all come from minerals and plants.