With Land, Skye and Sea

The works of Patricia Shone

Patricia Shone: Raku fired ceramic vessels

Patricia Shone was born in Scotland and moved to South Devon as a child. She first encountered clay at school there. After studying ceramics in London, finances and a first love of cooking led her to work as a chef in the UK and Italy. She returned to the country of her birth, drawn to the Isle of Skye, where she has been dedicated to ceramics for nearly three decades. 

The powerful landscape around the Isle of Skye has informed her ceramics. The surfaces of the land eroded by forces of climate and human intervention are the inspiration for the textures on her forms.

The natural textures of clay are similar to the patterns of erosion and decay in the land's geology. Patricia aims to achieve a tension between the spontaneous patterns of texture and the formality of a vessel form. She creates vessels, boxes, bowls and jars because they represent innately human vessels of containment. There is another tension there, too, between the natural and the human. 

Unsurprisingly, the ceramic chapters of her life have woven together her life experiences and environments and inspire the shapes and surfaces she produces.

Patricia Shone: Erosion bowl

She says—

The natural textures produced by clay reflect the formation and erosion in the geology of the land. The techniques I use to make my pots encourage the development of these textures on the surface of a controlled and formal vessel.

 It has taken many years for me to begin to understand this path in my work and that our scars from living can be seen mirrored in the scars on the land."

With an instantly recognisable style, Patricia's work is a balance of bold texture, drama and grace, with many pieces fashioning strong, earthy, smoky exteriors and contrasting marbled interiors veined with thin cracks typical of the raku process. 

Her pieces are made by hand building, throwing, texturing, stretching, and carving. Colours are achieved using slips, oxides and glazes, but most of all, by the firing processes. She uses raku firings for soft earthenware blacks and greys, wood firing for warm earth tones and glazed stoneware, and saggar firing within the wood kiln for dark greys and glazed stoneware. These techniques give her a wide range of textures and densities of ceramic surface and body. They often create moody yet elegant vessels that mimic and are an interpretation of human civilisation, such as bowls and bottles.

Patricia Shone is a highly celebrated ceramic artist who has received numerous awards for her ceramic work. She won the prestigious Emmanuel Cooper Prize at Ceramic Art London 2019, resulting in works being selected for the Victoria & Albert Museum's permanent collection.

Patricia Shone: Erosion bottles