Nature & Solitude, 2025

This is a 3-day display of my work which will show at The Old Prison, Fosse Way, Northleach, GL54 3JH from Thursday-Saturday, March 6th-8th, 2025.

Reviving the Salon

This is the second of my 'salon series' started by Frances Bates at her house in Wootton by Woodstock, in 2024. The salons are a chance to view the work in a more intimate setting than a gallery normally provides, with talks and guided tours by people who have known my work for many years. The Old Prison in Northleach is a thriving new arts centre providing a local arts focus to the surrounding, mainly rural, population in the Cotswolds.

The Trees and Flowers

Much of the work in the show derives from my love of both Nature - whether wild or tamed - and Solitude. Trees are a particular passion - their resilience is always inspiring as well as their formal beauty and seasonal changes. The 'Ash Tree in Spring,' (pictured here,) is in my local park, still going strong despite the 'die back' that has affected so many elsewhere. That moment of change from graceful bare branches to the first scattering of leaves is always a thrill and a sure sign that Spring has arrived. It is often one of the last trees to come into full leaf.

Peonies

The Peony bowl is the 'Sarah Bernhardt,' and grows in my garden. I have several, to ensure that at least one puts up a good show even if I do end up having to bring them into the house to avoid ruin by a sudden summer downpour. 

The Vases

There will be four vases from 'The Garden' series begun in 2024. I revisited the formal and design concerns of flowers on pots when I did these. In many ways I see plants and landscape as fundamentally abstract: the mood they generate is often created by the abstract forms, affected by colour and light. These ones are done to a limited palette and with some emphasis on the spatial effects of colour in what is, ultimately, a decorative motif. The result seems quite gothic-romantic to me. You can read more about them here and and see more images. There are two Iris vases, very different from each other, one in colour, one monochrome, a Wisteria - pictured in this post - and a Laburnum.

Yes! Lovely! But this is all in a PRISON?!

Yes, it was a prison and the ghosts of prisons never quite vanish. Friends of the Cotswolds are at pains to bring out that history and communicate it to it audiences. This is not just another cosy heritage project to preserve an interesting building. Rural life was harsh in the past and the Cotswolds were no exception. Wootton, where I grew up, had a work house. The building is still there. It sits alongside Union Square. The struggles of rural people are written into the names of the streets and buildings. I recently worked with a prison reform group, 'Keep Prisons Single Sex,' run by Kate Coleman, and designed a mug for them to commemorate the bicentenary of Elizabeth Fry who introduced single sex accommodation to the prison estate. Women and girls were incarcerated with men before 1823, with no privacy, routinely raped and their dignity violated.

Street Exit and women@thewell 

A couple of my pots from 'And the Door Opened,' will be included. This is the project I did with women@thewell, (w@w,) a charity based in Kings Cross, London, that supports women in prostitution and helps them to find ways out. Street Exit, (2 images in this post,) is one of those pots and illustrates an account of a woman supported by w@w who was in the process of exiting. Women and girls, particularly those trafficked from rural areas, were often imprisoned for being sexually exploited on the streets of the big cities and they still are. These days, girls in small towns and rural areas are mainly targeted by 'county lines' operatives and 'grooming' gangs.

Nature & Solitude will introduce my work a new audience and represent the full range of what I do. The exhibition will reflect both the peace and natural beauty of the surroundings and the history of the building in which it is displayed.

Monochrome Ceramic dish with tree
bowl handmade Peony flowers Summer
Large slipware vase decorated with Wisteria
Will feature in my exhibition in Northleach at The Old Prison
Monochrome ceramic dish depicting tree
bowl handmade Peony flowers Summer
Large slipware vase decorated with Wisteria
Claudia-Clare-Street-Exit-2