Anne-Marie Jacobs lives on Mersea Island, among the Essex Saltmarshes, and her current modular ceramic work is inspired by her own aerial photographs of the landscape. The pots she creates mirror the colours and patterns of the Essex salt marshes and coastline; she aims to convey at once the strength and the fragility of these environments. The saltmarsh is an extraordinary wilderness but one that is threatened by rising sea levels as the marsh struggles to grow fast enough to keep up. The marsh is the best natural sea defence and habitat to so many species of wildlife, it has been dubbed Britain’s equivalent of the rainforest.
Surface, rather than volume, becomes the dominant focus, allowing an unmediated view where the eye is free to wander and seek fresh relations and connections between features. This evokes a feeling of disorientation, which unsettles our expectations, surprises our senses and, importantly for her, creates an intimacy with the landscape.
Anne-Marie Jacobs is a former human rights lawyer who discovered ceramics in 2012 and thus commenced her second career. She is currently finishing her MA in Sculptural Practice at Colchester School of Art. Originally from Surrey, which is so full of hills and woods that you rarely see the sky, the flat Essex marshland made a big impression on her and she has been making art in response to it ever since moving there.