Meet the Artist: Ella Porter
We sat down with ceramicist Ella Porter, who is part of our current exhibition Terroir & Texture, to talk about her interest in found objects, how the 2014 Glasgow School of Art Fire has affected the way she creates and why she loves the colour green.
Ella Porter, Terrain, 7 parian black and green wall pieces, 22 x 15.5 cm, £135 each, £940 together. Created especially for Terroir & Texture.
Ella Porter completed her Foundation Diploma at Camberwell College of Art, followed by a BA in Painting and Printmaking at Glasgow School of Art. Following her BA and the GSA fire of 2014, she was awarded a Phoenix Bursary and received the NL Culture prize, for which she produced a solo exhibition. Ella went on to set up a studio in London and began working with clay which led to her Diploma in Ceramics at the CityLit, 2017. In 2021 she completed her MA at The Royal College of Art, which was supported by The Queen Elizabeth Scholarship Trust. Ella’s work has been exhibited with independent galleries as well as the Ingram Prize, for which she was a 2021 finalist as well as other public and private collections.
Ella is one of the artists featured in our current exhibition Terroir & Texture. She is showing a selection of pieces from various recent creative series, including 7 wall pieces called Terrain created especially for the exhibition. These pieces, like much of her work, act like sculptural canvases, exploring the undulations and accident of textural surfaces.
Ella is joined in this show by wood artisan Laurence Moracchini. Both artisans respond to their material’s fragility, enhancing the aspects of ‘imperfection’ inherent to both wood and clay. Together, their work creates a contemplative exhibition which explores the intersection between natural materials and the hand of the maker.
The exhibition runs from the 1st – 17th November in our tasting room.
A selection of Ella’s work in her studio, along with found objects and the purple beaded ‘stamp.’
Can you talk to us about how you have developed your specific textural language?
The imprints you can see in the Jade Vessels have been created by me weaving together beads into a rectangle, casting them in clay and imprinting this ‘stamp’ into the vessel's surfaces. I have woven together beads ever since I was a little kid, so it feels natural to bring this into my creative practice.
I love, and have always loved, working on this molecular scale. Building up the woven structure of the grid with repetitive stamping nods to this idea of human intervention that I find so interesting. From the earliest civilisations, the things that remain are pieces of ceramics and pieces of jewellery. Anywhere there are indigenous cultures, ceramics and jewellery are always the earliest art forms, and they have become signifiers for traces of humanity. Both things have always fascinated me because of their longevity and because they represent a balance between utility and decoration. There is an intrinsic human need to decorate yourself and your space. I feel like my work is a continuation of this tradition.
What importance do found objects have within your work?
Fragments of found objects often inform the pieces and processes of making; the original found object sometimes becoming a physical part of the finished piece, a secret detail discovered inside a ceramic vessel. I will mud lark for objects in the banks of the Thames, finding segments of ceramic smoking pipes. These shards of pipe, with their round structure and hollow inside, have a structural relationship to the bead and I weave together these found sections in the same way I create my beaded stamps.
My parents house in Norfolk used to be an 18th century pub, so I used to find loads of fragmented pipes in the garden. I enjoy them as they are evidence of the place’s history and are traces of human activity. Using these found objects within the work, either as physical components or as part of the process, shows my curiosity about the physical world. My parents are architects, and I was brought up in a very visual household, so I am always beginning with a response to space. This is why ceramics are so important to me because the process begins with responding to something – the material - rather than like with painting or printmaking, when you’re conjuring from thin air.
Jade Beaded Sculptural Vessel with Cut Out, 33 x 19 x 6.5 cm
£850.00
What is your relationship to accident?
I am relatively meticulous in the way that I work, although sometimes things don’t come out exactly as intended. I will plan out the way things might interact in the kiln, forms, structures and textural ideas in a sketchbook. Then I will take one of these ideas and explore them physically with slabs of clay, pushing the material to its limits by experimenting with different thicknesses or challenging myself with height.
As I push the material to its limits, sometimes the lip (or rims) will warp in the kiln and splits or chinks appear in the vessel's sides. These chinks end up being a really beautiful part of the finished piece. They let in the sunlight, meaning that even if the piece is stationary, it will continue to change with the daylight. I really enjoy it when an object has a continuing and changing relationship to its space.
Every piece will come out differently. Working with ceramics is to work with the tension between control and chaos; choosing when to intervene and when to not. It’s the imperfections that make the final piece beautiful rather than the perfections.
From a personal point of view, my degree show at the Glasgow School of Art was completely destroyed by the 2014 fire, so I now understand there is a beauty in letting go. There is a big part of my personality that wants to be accurate and measured and another part which wants to let go – there is a constant play between these two sides and that’s why the work is the way it is.
Oxide, glaze and slip tests.
You have a very defined colour palette, with often one colour explored in a series of work. Can you talk to us about how you choose your palette?
My palette has come from working with copper a lot historically. As a printmaker I enjoyed copper plate etching, which is still a part of my practice. Copper in it’s solid metal form has a warm reddish tone to it, which I enjoy and I have replicated this warm tone in my terracotta pieces. When you put copper into a glaze it transforms in an alchemical process, changing to it’s complementary colour: green. When copper weathers naturally it also transforms from red to green, this is how verdigris is created, through copper patination. I enjoy that the transformation of the glaze creates a similar hue transformation as weathering – again there is this link to how something can change throughout time. I have enjoyed exploring this verdigris copper oxide alchemy in my ‘Jade vessel’ series.
