'Silk-screen printing enables me to create a rich surface with a sense of depth. I collage together old photographs, fragmented letters on parchment, and the texture of lime-washed peeling walls to try and evoke the past and provide a narrative for the viewers'.In producing large stoneware vessels using the imagery of the domestic 'family' on to pillar-like shapes, together with more private plaques using personal client photographs, Fleur Harvey has evolved a convincing series of work. Architecturally-driven ceramics with the characteristics of family-elegy can be the basis for images of complexity and haunting narrative force. Painterly, graphic and sculptural skills are used to assemble works of multiple reference. Reminiscent of columns in a church (Harvey has been based in the Salisbury Arts Centre, itself housed in a listed medieval church) pieces have been crumpled, stressed and reformed in the process of manufacture, suffering their own architectural forces, though the stressed shapes are entirely deliberate. The overall look of the pots, with a sharp white stoneware body, is clean and contemporary. These vessels have a tendency to lean (even if their bases are solid enough) where, even a column in the nave, battered by time, would remain convincingly erect.
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