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I am pleased with my visual response overall as I really struggled to create it, parts kept falling off all the time and it was difficult to stick them back on without damaging it even more.

As a class we went to the Mission Gallery in Swansea to look at art work. Unaware of which artist it was when arriving I was pleasantly surprised when I realised we were looking at pieces made by Claire Curneen. 

While studying an Extended Diploma in art and design at college I learnt ceramics. For the two years I was studying there, Ceramicist Claire Curneen quickly became one of my favourite artists. I instantly fell in love with her work, I was attracted to the way she creates her eerie figures. 

As one of the UK’s foremost ceramicists Claire Curneen’s work is distinct for its figuration. She is also a Senior Lecturer at the Centre for Ceramic Studies, Cardiff Metropolitan University.

Curneen is notable for her hand-building, pinching and applying clay in patches that registers the artist’s hand and flesh in the surface of the clay, Curneen produces highly visceral works, which tap into our deepest desires, fears and mysteries. Referencing Roman Catholic imagery and ideology and early Italian Renaissance paintings such as Piero Della Francesca’s ‘Baptism of Christ’, these figures bear bold narratives of saints, martyrs and rites of passage punctuated by often delicate yet dramatic totems to death, re-birth and the sublime.

 Her work is very closely linked to nature so for my visual response I want to attempt to create a small figure similar to Curneen’s work, I want to try and add a leaf or flower design to the piece in gold to make it look closer to nature.