Clay Paintings

The artworks of Isabel Merrick

Isabel Merrick: Landscape Ceramic Canvas Vessel IV

Isabel Merrick’s artistic career spans nearly 30 years. She lives in the Devonshire countryside, close to local coastlines. She is sensitive to seasonal changes and her environment, and both influence her work.

The seasons not only determine her colour palette, but also dictate a rhythm and method of working. She uses the winter months to hunker down in her studio and produce her art—a form of hibernation. Whereas, come the spring and summer months, she is ready to reveal her creations at various exhibitions and events she has planned and to be more social.

Isabel Merrick: Landscape Ceramic Canvas Vessel III

Isabel Merrick: Landscape Ceramic Canvas Vessel VII

She says—

“Expanding the palette, helping towards exploring ways to convey my view of the environment I live in. A bit like using a telescope to look into the details of the landscape, deconstructing the elements of the countryside. Looking at the season's colour and light changes. The chaos of a hedge or the strength and power of a tree created with its presence, and then reconstructing and simplifying those images to portray the energy and feeling of a thing.”

She deeply connects with nature, not just visually, but also in how it grows, develops, and forms. There is an evident synergy between how she creates, nature and time. The appreciation that spending moments in nature slows time, but it also takes time to birth an idea or creation.

Isabel Merrick: Landscape Ceramic Canvas Vessel II

Landscape Ceramic Canvas Vessel V

Accompanied by her dog, she roams to collect ideas, using photography and plein-air sketches to record a visual diary of changes in nature and the seasons. During these ramblings, Isabel will collect leaves, twigs, and moss to serve as a starting point for the work. By magnifying, simplifying and capturing the overall sense of nature in all its beauty, she includes rolling hills and landscapes onto the surface of the clay. Using simple domestic forms, she transforms them into three-dimensional paintings.

Building her visual diary through recording ideas in her sketchbooks is a central component of her creative dialogue and in the development of new ceramic work.

Working in a painterly way with coloured slips and incorporating mark-making elements such as Sgraffito, Isabel finds a new visual narrative for the environment she lives in through her ceramic art.