Deborah books Chichester Art Trail slot with new work
The pandemic brought an epiphany and a change of direction for Deborah Harwood. Deborah went into the first lockdown as a textile artist and emerged from it as a ceramic artist. The results will be on show from April 2-June 25 at Gallery 57, 57 Tarrant Street, Arundel, BN18 9DJ (www.gallery57.co.uk).
Deborah will also be taking part in this year’s Chichester Art Trail on April 30, May 1, 2, 7 and 8 (Venue 8, Deborah Harwood Ceramics, Charlton Barns, Charlton, PO18 0HX).
“Towards the end of 2019 I was teaching six months foundation textile arts and then I was having six months off to do my own work. And I had been doing that for years. I had been terribly busy, moving my dad down to the country and so on and I had not really had a proper time to do my own work so I decided to take a sabbatical from teaching and that would give me 18 months.
“I had been working in silk organza, the very, very finest material, almost transparent. It is what veils are made of and it is really, really beautiful and it made me think about porcelain and that it is actually quite similar in some ways. I just started linking the two. I had not touched clay since I was at school so I went off and did a two-hour taster session with Loam near Petersfield. I thought I’d just have a go and see what it was like and what happened I can only liken to an epiphany. I just fell passionately in love.
“Jack who owns Loam said I was quite good at it doing it for the first time and so I signed up to do an eight-week course and we were a week into that when lockdown came. And it was just so frustrating.
“My partner, is a landscape gardener and he was able to work throughout the pandemic albeit on a slightly reduced scale. So I just thought to hell with it and bought a wheel and a pile of stoneware and I sat every day throwing until I could do it. I would get up early and watch an hour and a half of Youtube videos over and over again and then I would just throw until the connection was made. The really interesting thing was discovering that to centre clay you have to be centred yourself. You have to have focus. Dad always used to say when there was a trauma in the family or something, that you have to keep a still centre, and he was right. Everything comes from the centre in clay so to centre it you have to be centred yourself. You have to be calm. You have to be peaceful and then when I had done stoneware I thought OK I would like to do porcelain. And porcelain is the diva of the clays. One minute it wants more water and then it collapses on you. I had to learn everything over and over again. But then when I realised that all I ever wanted to do was to make ceramics from now on, I got a kiln, and without sounding horribly pretentious, I knew that I had found my creative language. It answered everything that I had really battled with textiles, just to get the simplicity of form and the purity of line.”
Which isn’t to say that Deborah wishes she had discovered ceramics earlier: “It is a journey and I have done all this in two years but I have been in creative practice for 20 years. You just reapply your skills and your creativity in a different way. So no I’m not wishing I had started this 20 years earlier. I didn’t. I loved my teaching but I certainly won’t go back to teaching now. I am about to be 59 and I want to die a master craftsman! And I know that you have to put in an awful lot of hours for that! But doing this is actually really really physical. It’s tough on the hands and tough on the shoulders and tough on the back and it’s also one of those things where you are so absorbed in what you are doing that you don’t realise that you are not in the right position and then suddenly you sit up and realise that you should have changed position a long time ago. So it is pretty demanding but I realise now it is so hugely important to me.”