Maker Showcase

15 April - 27 May

For this Maker Showcase, Imogen Taylor-Noble will be making a new body of work which will be exploring the environmental challenges that emerge in her practice as a maker in relation to the Climate Emergency.

Exploring the issues of sustainability, environmental impact, and regeneration, and finding ways to share the responsibility for making art.

All of this through the medium of clay and wood firing.

Photograph by Ben Boswell

Is it possible to be a carbon neutral ceramicist?

Exploring issues of sustainability, environmental impact, and regeneration, and finding ways to share the responsibility for making art.

This body of work forms part of an enquiry into what it means to me to be a ceramicist in this time of climate emergency. It has required me to expand my practice into areas and ideas new to me and represents part of an ongoing creative process.

I have looked at areas where I can reduce my use of manufactured clay bodies, reduce my carbon ‘spending’, and in some works, leave out the carbon costly firing process altogether.

Where possible, works have been fired in a wood-fired kiln. The kiln is in a 100 year old coppice, of many hundreds of trees. The carbon ‘debt’ of each firing is replaced by 200 mature trees growing for 1 year.

Carbon saving in the longer term is made possible through the concept of offering an unfired pot, a ‘twin’ housing a young growing tree, with each fired work. The choice to care for the tree, allowing it to mature by planting it out, will more than compensate for the carbon spent in firing it’s ‘twin’ pot. Thus enabling the new owner to share responsibility for the carbon generated by the creation of the art work.

Presenting clay in it’s natural state, the ‘paintings’ use foraged clays which I have encountered in the wild. They have been brought to the surface by moles or erosion and have not involved mechanical or extractive processes. I have blended them by hand, adding binders to turn them into a semi-durable slip with which to make these works.

The clay slips retain their original qualities of colour variation and texture. The ‘paintings’ are made on off-cuts of wood which would otherwise have been destined for fire wood.

I work from my studio in South Brent where I also run regular pottery classes in hand building.