Edges, Watts Gallery & Artists’ Village

Following Kay Aplin & Joseph Young ‘s residency at Watts Gallery in autumn 2023, The Ceramic House Edges project reaches its conclusion with an exhibition at Watts Gallery Artists Village from July – November 2024.

Aplin & Young’s 3 months in residence at Watts Gallery followed on from their residency at Interface in Ireland in June 2023, where they spent a month researching the landscape of Connemara. They used their time at Watts Gallery – Artists Village to investigate the heritage and history of Watts and to create new work inspired by both sites. The resulting work will be exhibited in Watts Gallery from July-November 2024, bringing the Edges project to a conclusion.

The Edges exhibition transfers to Watts from its inaugural showing at Wexford Arts Centre, with new works made especially for Watts by Joseph Young and Kay Aplin.

Edges explores ceramics and sound art practice through the work of artists from three nations at the western and eastern fringes of Europe – Ireland, UK and Estonia. The works were developed as part of artist residencies and international exchanges, creating collaborative encounters across the two disciplines.

Edges explores what it means to work at the edge of something and how we understand the outsider. Edges also expands on the idea of artistic practice as a so-called ‘cutting edge’, through the investigation of geographical boundaries and coastlines of the host nations.

The exhibition at Watts Gallery is the result of three separate artist residencies. All of the artworks exhibited can be seen as works-in-progress or experimental iterations, made under tight time constraints and in response to place and site.

The first residency took place in April 2022 at The Ceramic House (supported by i-Portunus European funding) pairing two sound artists from Ireland, Linda O’Keeffe and Suzanne Walsh, with Estonian ceramists Juss Heinsaluand Pille Kaleviste. Over a period of four weeks, they worked together in pairs and the resulting exhibition Peripheries was shown as part of the Brighton Artists Open Houses festival.

The second residency at Interface in the Inagh Valley, Connemara in June 2023, saw Kay Aplin and Joseph Young exploring the Connemara landscape, accompanied by curator Richard Carr, in a series of walks and wanderings, gathering binaural sound recordings and plant, fossil, lichen specimens as they went.

The third residency took place at Watts Gallery & Artist Village in autumn 2023. Here, Kay and Joseph explored a more personal take on encounters through partnership, both through the lens of their own relationship and the creation of The Ceramic House, their artist home, which was conceived and developed by Kay.

Additionally, the curators commissioned ceramic artist Katharine West (IE) and sound artist Patrick Tubin McGinley (EE) – selecting pre-existing works to be displayed together creating a dialogue in the gallery space and uncovering new ways of listening and viewing the material (clay) and the ephemeral (sound).

New works created for the Watts show include

• A geo-located sound trail in various locations around the estate exploring both the collaborative process, archival material from Watts and field recordings including new work by Richard Carr
• New large-scale wall mounted ceramic works by Kay Aplin for the Chapel and the reading nook in Limnerslease