Elizabeth Murphy (b. 1979) is a ceramic artist based in Oxfordshire with a unique approach towards ceramics. Referencing ancient archetypes, her hand built and thrown stoneware vessels reveal the poetry of traditional forms through textural interventions. 

Working in an improvisational and expressionistic style with meandering and woven texture, the vessel form is revealed, obscured, embraced and transformed by the applied surface decoration giving each piece a sense of movement. Glaze plays an important part adding extra depth to the surface revealing aspects of the texture and form. Each vessel is an investigation where no surface is the same and no two works are alike as each piece seems to lead on to another inquiry in different clay bodies, texture and glaze combinations. 

Sea Surface Full Of Clouds II

Wallace Stevens

In that November off Tehuantepec
The slopping of the sea grew still one night.
At breakfast jelly yellow streaked the deck

And made one think of chop-house chocolate
And sham umbrellas. And a sham-like green
Capped summer-seeming on the tense machine

Of ocean, which in sinister flatness lay.
Who, then, beheld the rising of the clouds
That strode submerged in that malevolent sheen,

Who saw the mortal massives of the blooms
Of water moving on the water-floor?
C'etait mon frere du ciel, ma vie, mon or.

The gongs rang loudly as the windy booms
Hoo-hooed it in the darkened ocean-blooms.
The gongs grew still. And then blue heaven spread

Its crystalline pendentives on the sea
And the macabre of the water-glooms
In an enormous undulation fled.

 

Stoneware, Oxide and Glaze

17x37cm