Jane Norbury ceramics 2020

The Passeuses are a series of sculptures made in my studio in Burgundy in 2020 and early 2021. They were developed for Flux d’Argiles, an installation at La Grange Dimière, Isère, in which I contrast the movement of liquid clay flowing vertically under gravity, seen on six large cloth hangings, with 27 Passeuses, lying horizontally on the floor. These sculptures are made from fired stoneware clays and range from 55cm to 90cm in diameter. To fire the largest ones I had to build a new gas kiln, a project that I have wanted to realise for more than 20 years, and which now opens possibilities for other big pieces.

Les Passeuses, since that is what the artist calls them, are the result of a slow and complex process in which chance has its place and which aims to make people forget not the gesture, but the imprint of the hand. Built from slabs, which are then rolled in a round and constraining matrix, the clay coils fold, breathe, and exhale, creating cavities and highlights. More and more, Jane Norbury adds to these viscera of clay, a second ring of different clay, whose grogged texture and colour, after firing, will contrast with the first. Together, these two associated clays must react in the same way to the firing and have the same degree of shrinkage. The clays merge, as if causing the phenomena of subduction over a long geological period. These elementary, magmatic forms, heavy from time immemorial, carry with them the memory of alluvial mixtures; inspire the sudden petrifaction of a movement in progress.
Extract from text ‘Avec La Terre’, Stéphanie Le Follic–Hadida, PHD in contemporary ceramics.

For me these undulating and annular forms evoke a feeling of passage, they are open to the earth and rise up from it. Their contact with the ground is minimal but stable, the lifting up is sometimes due to the second clay pushing through the first, and by the end of the series one ring lifts another. The Passeuses suggest for me the fluid movement necessary to go towards the unknown, inviting us to pass from one side to the other like traversing the threshold of a door, or allowing us to cross to the other side of the river. Other images that accompanied me in this work were those of the algal burrs of the Lulworth Fossil Forest - large stone rings on the Dorset coast, dating from the Jurassic period, created from silt gathered at the base of the trees, once underwater..