Thick, bulbous torsos, elongated necks, wide shoulders and open mouths; to describe pottery is to describe our own bodily presence. Versatile, pliable and sympathetically human, the parallels between Aurora Elwell’s art practice and the medium of clay is palpable. With a practice that has to date centered on the physicality of the human body, Elwell continues her exploration moving deeper under the surface to examine the intrinsic emotions that make us uniquely human. These wordless vessels speak volumes as we recognise a deep resonance with our own selves; Elwell is creating a visual language for our emotions.

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Clay is challenging. It is soft, forgiving and malleable yet will just as quickly turn around and manipulate the potter. A bodily material, it responds to your touch, you can push and pull it, tear it and suppress it, clay responds to the movement of your body and it requires a certain amount of physical resilience. Working with clay asks a lot of the potter, in her own words Elwell is emphatic, “if you can’t enjoy and overcome the challenges of clay, it could [quite easily] tear you down!” This is a key statement, Art rarely exists in isolation to an artist’s biography and to fully grasp an artist’s intent we must view their practice as an experimental enquiry. This body of work, this collection of vessels, is a product of such, one of the mastery of the wheel and the other, Elwell’s journey exploring and processing the many and varied emotions that we experience.

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Whilst Elwell’s practice centers on bodily themes, learning to throw clay has shaped an increasingly abstract expression. Elwell became transfixed by the forms evolving at the wheel and this quiet submission to process positioned Elwell to focus on, and begin questioning, the presence of large, often overwhelming emotions. Employing Somatic Therapy as a framework, Elwell cultivated her enquiry to explore what these emotions might look like as tangible objects. Somatic Therapy suggests that emotions, events and experiences hold space within our bodies with any unresolved emotions taking shape and becoming trapped. This approach builds on the artist’s previous research examining Friedrich Hegel’s “Phenomenology of Spirit”. Hegel teaches that if we extract our feelings and treat them as an external ‘other’ we can access a deeper, more objective analysis of those feelings and by conclusion achieve greater self awareness. In making her emotions the subject of her work, they now exist separate from the artist and as a tangible object they can be studied, assessed and more importantly, interrogated; from a place of objectivity Elwell can ask “what is this feeling, how does it sit in my body and how does it look?”. In this sense, Elwell embodies the tension that is pottery-making, a partnership with process and a submission to material. Rarely planning the shapes in advance, her practice is meditative, it is objective and forgiving, emotions are extracted and surveyed. The wheel is a sacred and considered space, the one place where judgement no longer exists, keeping her in check, it is now the clay which holds space for the emotions.

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In a time when Artificial Intelligence has become a strong contender in artistic expression it seems poignant to identify the critical presence of the human hand. In 1954 Japanese philosopher Soetsu Yanagi wrote that the handmade renders a sense of “creativity, adaptability, freedom and heterogeneity”, arguing that the beauty extant in the handmade exists because “the human hand is the ever-present tool of human feeling”; an ironic reminder for a ceramicist whose practice explores human emotion. This direct link to the hand of the artist is crucial, once fired a vessel will have throwing lines mapping the movements Elwell has made, building a vessel is an intimate act. Spending so much time alone with an object, Elwell is clear that aside from the time with her husband, nothing else takes up as much energy, focus and one-on-one attention as when she is on the wheel. The intimate nature of pottery cannot be underestimated and it is within this intimacy that Desire found its genesis; drawing on her own relational experience Elwell examines the multifaceted and associative emotions that reside within this heady term.

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“Desire. Made in contemplation of the complexities of human longing and the many ways it is experienced…a form which captures the shape of yearning and its many facets within us; it can feel sharp, volatile and urgent, yet also tender, intricate and captivating.”

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The works that make up Desire have a demanding presence, the fierce, curvaceous forms are encased with sharp, flame-like spikes. Despite a restricted field of colour, there is a subtle sense of movement as the light bounces off the smooth curves and glassy glaze, the spikes flutter, these static vessels have become dynamic forms. The tactile nature of the clay is a strong proponent for the subject matter at hand, our desire is to touch, in our mind we run our hands along the belly of the vessel, our eyes dart in and out along the multitude of spikes, reaching up we caress the neck. As we circumambulate the objects we become intimately aware of their commanding presence and the emotions they embody; there is a provocation between the vessel and the viewer, they are “asking to be embraced”. 

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Scale is crucial to this body of work, throwing up to 15kgs of clay at a time Elwell has created vessels whose ‘bodies’ are close to life size yet whose ‘bodily’ proportions are unnatural. The decision to create large vessels is not just our physical resonance to their presence but also to illustrate our tendency to elevate emotions beyond the space that they belong, we can become possessed and obsessed by them, and sometimes, we weaponise them. Speaking of weapons, let’s talk - spikes. Originally employed as a counter balance to Elwell’s more figurative work, adding spikes creates a barrier between the body of the vessel and the viewer. Acting like armour, their presence engenders a sense of agency, Elwell’s vessels can now self defend. A source of protection from the vulnerabilities we face, these sharp, imposing elements become self defense mechanisms against the pain and heartbreak we endure. Yet in this body of work they also hold the tension of connectivity, vacillating between self preservation and open-ended vulnerability; Elwell is introducing directional change. The protective spikes soften and curve to illustrate the idea of movement and connection. Changing the direction of the spikes changes their intent and what they communicate; like aerial plants or the beginning of tree roots, these softer tendrils start to reach out and upwards, reaching for something beyond the object, beyond itself.

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Leading the viewer on a personal and curious path Desire is complete with hyper emotional and exaggerated forms. In making the invisible visible Elwell illustrates the large and weighty presence our emotions hold and the complexities which reside in our relational experiences. The juxtaposition of arrow-like spikes and softer curling tendrils highlights the duality of emotion, the strength and fragility, that exists in our desire for someone or something; joy and suffering can coexist, we must learn to find the tension. The value of Elwell’s practice is in the slow-reveal of meaning and although birthed in a personal exploration this exhibition does not exist solely for the artist; rather these tangible emotions now function as an entry point for the viewer, a challenge for reflection, it is an invitation to introspection.