Anne-Marie lives on Mersea Island, among the Essex salt marshes, and her current work is inspired by her own aerial photographs of this extraordinary wilderness. The marshland, with the habitats it offers and the biodiversity it encourages, is under threat.
Anne-Marie’s sculptural ceramics communicate an experience of the landscape, evoking a bodily relationship to it. Mark Rothko insisted that his Seagram murals were not pictures, but that he had made a ‘place’. In her work the ‘place’ oscillates, like the sense of scale, between the small landscape reliefs on the surface of some of the vessels and the large forms and negative spaces around the pieces themselves.
The work aims to relate a sense of risk as well as confidence; a threat of imbalance as well as elegant order; fragility as well as strength. The slip cast forms suggest controlled repetition and the glazes offer wild and serendipitous colours and textures formed in the kiln. This equilibrium is what she celebrates about the landscape and what Anne-Marie is anxious to encourage the viewer to want to conserve for its future.