Anti-hunting Campaign - Ceramics - Sophie Woodrow

 



Sophie Woodrow is a ceramic artist who mainly works with porcelain. Her artwork is hand crafted, focusing on intricate details, humanistic animals merged with natural looking forms.

Sophie was drawn to working with clay from an early age. Born in Bristol in 1979, she graduated in 2001 from Farmouth College of Art with a BA in Studio Ceramics. Since then she has refined an intricate labour-intensive technique and a highly distinctive visual language. Each piece is hand-built, involving coiling, incising and impressing to create a delicately textured surface.

"Her work has been informed by an interest in the Victorians as the first generation who chose to define nature in opposition to what is human. In a spirit of wild curiosity, tinged with fear, the Victorians idolised nature, ‘packaging’ it into highly romanticised, palatable works of art. Our modern-day understanding is very different, so that we now interpret much Victorian art as ‘unnatural’ or kitsch" (source).

Her work is both fantastical and figurative, depicting many different kinds of creatures made up of fragments of the natural world. The creatures themselves are often colonised by elements like limpets, mushrooms or faceted crystalline formations. The majority are painstakingly hand built but, more recently, Woodrow has made moulds of far simpler figures to be slip-cast. This was an economic decision which has proven profitable, though her interest remains predominantly on the hand-buil, more detailed work. 

Nature is an essential part of Woodrow's work. The attraction of depicting natural forms and themes is not just a response to nature itself as 'an endless source of fascination' but also 'an impulse to make art that reflects our understanding of our relationship to nature' She suggests that in referencing the natural world, designers and artists are trying to understand not only nature itself but also a sense of alienation from some lost aspect of what it means to be human. 



We find her work highly inspiring due to interesting forms and proportions. Me and Farsya are begginers, as we havn't done a lot of ceramics work before so it would be unrealistic to assume we would be able to produce a realist looking piece of ceramics work. Sophie's work gave us an idea to experiment more with patterns and shapes during modelling which will give us more experience and pust us to create unique and interesting pieces.