Anne-Marie Jacobs
Anne-Marie Jacobs is a ceramic artist who lives and works on Mersea Island, among the Essex salt marshes. She makes slip cast white earthenware vessels, built as sculptural forms and glazed so that their surfaces read as landscape: bands of colour, drips that run like creeks, and small reliefs drawn from her own aerial photographs of the marshes.
She studied at Colchester School of Art, graduating in 2014 and completing her MA in 2016, and showed at New Designers in London in her graduating year. She exhibits across the country, at Art in Clay, the Potfest fairs and Celebrating Ceramics, and closer to home with Mersea Island Artists and at The Minories in Colchester. Her work has been the subject of a filmed interview for BBC Countryfile, and her book East Wind is published in hardback.
Artist Statement
I live on Mersea Island, among the Essex salt marshes, and my current work is inspired by my own aerial photographs of this extraordinary wilderness.
The marshland, with the habitats it offers and the biodiversity it encourages, is under threat. My response to these concerns could be called 'Pot Propaganda'.
The work aims to relate a sense of risk as well as confidence; a threat of imbalance as well as elegant order; fragility as well as strength. The slip cast forms suggest controlled repetition and the glazes offer wild and serendipitous colours and textures formed in the kiln. This equilibrium is what I celebrate about the landscape and what I am anxious to encourage the viewer to want to conserve for its future.
My political, environmental soap box is made of clay but I am not a scientist or a campaigner, I simply want to share my enthusiasm. I take my work seriously but I am not serious minded about it. The work comes from a sense of joy and play.
