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Our collaboration is an ongoing process through which we find gratitude towards many special friends, colleagues and family members who support our work. ‘Embodied Clay’ (2018) and ‘Sensorial Ground’ (2020) were commissioned by the British Ceramics Biennial (BCB) — The Clay Foundation (TCF) for their National Summer School Programme. The setting of BCB with its culture of embracing new ceramics practice and meaningful engagement provided the ground for this collaboration. We specifically thank Barney Hare Duke, Rhiannon Ewing-James, Gabriella Rhodes, and Nicola Patel. We’d especially like to thank Dena Bagi, former engagement manager at the BCB who initiated and nourished the ‘Embodied Clay’ workshop. We owe everything to Dena, who first saw the similarities in our interests in ceramics and found a way to bring us together. In this exposition, we refer to a small number of workshop participants but would like to recognize all the participants of ‘Embodied Clay’ (2018) workshop and the ‘Sensorial Ground’ workshop (2020). Some of the videos shown in the context of this exposition were made during Brick Workshop in Egernsund, Denmark (2013). For this valuable opportunity that has initiated a lot of meaningful work, we want to thank Kerstin Abraham and all the brick factories in Egernsund that generously opened their doors for artists.
Our collaboration has formed an ongoing conversation through which we nourish shared ground, and question and extend the parameters of our personal approaches to artistic research and practice.
Artist–researchers Priska Falin and Helen Felcey first worked together when writing a short collaborative piece for ‘Cooking with Clay’ (Ceramics and Its Dimensions, 2016). Working remotely between Dunham Massey and Helsinki, a real connection was made and the opportunity to work together more closely came in 2018, through ‘Embodied Clay’ for the British Ceramics Biennial’s National Summer School, 2018 (Bagi, Falin and Felcey). This first collaboration explored embodied dimensions of personal practices, particularly our sensory experiences of making. In 2019, we participated in a Field Station Residency at the Ifö Center (Bromölla, Sweden) coordinated by SLAM. Working together in an abandoned factory amidst the remnants of human labour, we began to ask, what’s really important? What are we really creating and nourishing? As we moved into 2020, we stepped into the world pandemic and such reflections felt increasingly relevant. Within this backdrop, we shaped the ‘Sensorial Ground’ workshop for BCB National Summer school 2020, seeking to support practitioners in their ongoing creative practice. The recent continuation of our collaboration has been for the exhibition ‘Särkyvää — Ceramics Facing the New’ in Espoo Museum of Modern Art in Finland (2021–2022). For this, we developed a series of workshops, an installation and an online workshop that as a whole builds around the notion of dwelling, discussed also in this exposition.
At the moment of writing this exposition, Priska Falin is finishing her doctoral thesis at Aalto University, Finland. In her artistic research, she focuses on the experiential and performative dimensions of ceramic practice. The core of her work engages with the ways we connect ourselves to world through material encounters. She draws from an abstract space where words fail to describe the embodied experiences that create the grounds for constructing ourselves.
Helen Felcey is a ceramics-based artist and educator. Her professional experience traces a story of material practice intertwined with educational practice, with research interests across craft, design and social well-being. She tutors at Liverpool Hope University, UK. Alongside her work in arts and education, Felcey is a trustee of the Gomde UK Tibetan Buddhist Centre.
