Mary Jones (The Brick Thief)
Mary Jones’ work is a response to conversations she encounters with people in her everyday life. She is particularly interested in dialogues with strangers on public transport. She gathers these heart-to-hearts with visual information and returns with them to her studio.
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Mary Jones, also known as The Brick Thief, is a talented artist in the world of figurative ceramics. Her work is sculptural, figurative, painterly and expressive, with an emphasis on human emotion and how this is translated through facial expression. Mary aims to find different ways to convey emotional range, communicating them through ceramic practice and consequently giving each piece a ' presence '.
Mary’s process always starts with a conversation. She interviews her subjects, encouraging them to discuss their childhood and the people who were significant to them. However, some of Mary's more recent work is in response to conversations she has had with people in her everyday life, the most recent focusing on conversations with strangers on train journeys.
Mary emphasises expressions and feelings by pressing broken shards of crockery into the clay structure of the sculpted faces. These shards represent memories, triggering the emotions embedded in our personalities. Colour is also key to Mary's work; these vibrant tones are achieved by using porcelain slips, under-glazes and oxides. It is important to her that her work is immediate, loose and playful. By working this way she endeavours to capture the essence of who we are, revealing our internal worlds -
Mary Jones acquired her nickname ‘The Brick Thief’ early on in her ceramic journey. One day whilst walking around Cardiff with her friends she spotted a skip full of broken colourful tiles and bricks, she started enthusiastically filling her and her friend’s bags, with the vision of embedding the shards into her ceramic sculptures. Her friends found this highly amusing and thus ‘The Brick Thief’ nickname was born!
In Summer 2021, Mary Jones as The Brick Thief launched a collection under designer Paul Smith. -
Mary Jones attended university later in life, after raising two children and running arts and crafts classes for people with learning disabilities for more than ten years. In Mary's second year of studies she went to Germany and worked with acclaimed ceramicist, Elke Sada, who inspired her hugely. She graduated in 2013 with a First (Hons) from Cardiff Metropolitan University.
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Following her graduation in 2013, Mary Jones was selected for the Student residency at Fireworks Clay Studios in Cardiff for one year. She went on to win the Potclays Student Award at Art in Clay, and was the recipient of the Welsh Assembly Government Minister of Heritage Award.
Works
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