Amy Stoakes Ceramics

Amy is a ceramicist based in Herefordshire. Her work is interested in opposites: precision and unpredictability, memory and forgetting, permanence and imperfection. Clay is central to this exploration, resisting complete control and allowing each piece to develop through both intention and chance.

Mathematics, Memory + Future Excavation

This ongoing project started after reading about cuneiform writing on clay tablets and thinking about what texts would be found in the future from today, given that most writing is on paper or hard-drives. The first bowl in the project shows an excerpt from my grandfathers diary. The bowl is slab built, using a template which was created using a formula and which incorporates the golden ratio.

9 Small Stars (sold)

These 9 small stellated dodecahedrons were created using the slipcast mould from my previous project 'In Quiet Orbit'. They were decorated using Obvara, a technique where you fire the pieces in a raku kiln to around 1000c and then dunk them in a mixture of water, flour and yeast which has sat for a few days. I am fascinated by the variation in the resulting organic patterns, which form around the vertices and edges of the stars in a matter of seconds.

In Quiet Orbit

This slipcast form is a stellated dodecahedron, a 12 sided shape with each side 'stellated' or turned into a point. The mould creation was a real head-scratcher but eventually came to fruition as a 4-part mould. From this, and another smaller mould, I created the components for my piece 'In Quiet Orbit' which I exhibited (in my first exhibition) with Artlandish in Hereford.