Patricia Shone was born in Scotland but grew up in South Devon where she found her love of clay at school. After studying ceramics at Central School of Art in London, finances and a love of food led her into working as a chef both there and in Italy. Eventually the cooking took her to Skye where she returned to potting and where she has remained for twenty years.
“My work has developed over the years in response to the powerful landscape around me on the Isle of Skye and to a feeling of connection with the passage across the land of its past inhabitants. I make mostly functional forms, boxes, bowls, jars, rather direct representation of the landscape, because they are innately human vessels of containment. The surfaces of the land are eroded by forces of climate and human intervention, but the substance of it remains constant and immutable. Traces of the past are scratched all over the hills, and remain in ruined form, as fading monuments to the communities who worked the land.”
Patricia uses techniques in her clay work that reflect these processes. The pieces are made by throwing, texturing and altering or by beating, stretching and carving. Colours are achieved using slips, oxides and glazes but most of all by the firing processes.
“I want the natural forms, colours and textures of the work to engage the viewer with a landscape beyond daily experience. As we advance, technologically, the surfaces we touch become increasingly synthetic and machine finished. I feel that what challenges us now is the reality of nature – wild, uncomfortable, dirty, unpackaged, visceral experience.“
