Freddie Crossley
Millsparks Espresso set
Reduction Fired Stoneware
Vessel VI
68x30cm - Reduction Fired Stoneware
Freddie Crossley is an artist based in the South Downs. Working in clay, paint, theatre and music, his work uniquely bridges the performative and domestic, epic and ephemeral, the things we live with and the things we’ll never see again.
With bright wood ash glaze and sweeping oxide colouration, Freddie’s work reflects the landscape it comes from: the windswept grass, chalkhill blues, the trees and stone. Reduction fired to 1300 degrees, his glazes are made with the burnt wood of ash trees lost to ash-dieback in the woodlands around where he works. In extraordinary chance encounters of process and mineral, these glassy greens pooling into rare, bright blue, perhaps offer a farewell from those giants of our landscape, somehow translated here, vitrified in their long journey; held now in our hands and homes.
Kintsugi (金継ぎ, "golden joinery"), or kintsukuroi (金繕い, "golden repair"), offers an intoxicating ideology that something broken and repaired might be more beautiful than something whole. That there is rich beauty in imperfection - in the scars of our histories, in the winding paths of things - is a spring for hope.
Instagram: @freddiecrossley