#5 Edgelands
Somewhere in the hollows and spaces between our carefully managed wilderness areas and the creeping, flattening effects of global capitalism, there are still places where an overlooked England truly exists, places where ruderals familiar here since the last ice sheets retreated have found a way to live with each successive wave of new arrivals, places where the city’s dirty secrets are laid bare, and successive human utilities scar the earth or stand check by jowl with one another; complicated, unexamined places that that thrive on disregard, if we could only put aside our nostalgia for places we’ve never really known and see them afresh.
Edgelands, Paul Farley and Michael Symmons Roberts, 2011
Edgelands at County Hall Pottery responds to the book of the same name by poets Paul Farley and Michael Symmons Roberts which explores landscapes that are neither city nor countryside, the in-between places that are so familiar that we often overlook and ignore them, explores landscapes that are neither city nor countryside, the in-between places that are so familiar that we often overlook and ignore them. In prose but with the spirit of lyric poetry it is landscape writing that reveals these unobserved liminal areas as places of possibility, mystery and beauty.
As makers we are also drawn to these between spaces and frequently return to them as a rich visual and material source. Transitional, not quite urban, not quite rural, where nature reclaims the derelict or post-industrial, the pocket wildness of allotments and verges, the unkempt edges around modern infrastructure canals, pylons and train lines.
Invited Exhibitors
Rebecca Appleby
Rebecca Appleby is a ceramic artist exploring creation, decay and renewal. Blending raw materials with layered patinas, her work reflects resilience, transformation and the connection between human experience, architectural remnants and the passage of time.
For Edgelands Rebecca observes demolition sites, transitional landscapes on the threshold of wilderness. This in-between, where the past blurs with the untamed, offers a glimpse of nature’s quiet reclamation.
Rebecca’s focus is on the life cycle of materials, once organic then shaped for functional use. But these are impermanent and at the end of their lifespan they are dismantled, still infused with memories, history, and spirit. Some find new life, repurposed.
This reflects the human condition. We, too, carry the weight of memory, history, and experience, and like structures, our bodies break down over time, eventually returning to the earth in fragments. Yet, even in this disintegration, traces of who we were persist.
Hilary Bird-Mayo
Hilary Bird-Mayo is a London-based clay artist. Known for hand-built stoneware vessels with a focus on surface decoration, she has recently been exploring new approaches to making and materials. Themes of place, geology, fragility and resilience are a constant.
For Edgelands Hilary’s work responds to Orford Ness, a remote desert-like shingle spit on the fast eroding Suffolk coast. Once an MoD base used for experiments and bomb testing, it is now a place of wildness, nature conservation and a sanctuary for birdlife – a strange mix of beauty and desolation, dotted with concrete and corrugated iron buildings in a state of curated decay.
Hilary’s work seeks to capture the fragility, resilience and transient quality of this haunting, liminal space, at the point where nature intersects with a landscape scarred by human activity.
Ella Porter
Ella Porter is a London-based multidisciplinary artist specialising in ceramics and printmaking. She trained for a BA in painting and printmaking from Glasgow School of Art in 2014, and an MA in ceramics at the RCA in 2021, supported by The Queen Elizabeth Scholarship Trust.
Ella finds herself returning to the foreshore; an edgeland in the heart of the city yet separate, quiet and largely overlooked.
Ella produces objects and is concerned with material culture of the past and present, and feels it necessary to reflect on our collective production of things, and in turn to produce work with greater care for an uncertain future.
Through intricate process Ella aims to replicate the meditative nature of her walks; linear tracks over uneven surfaces, subtle meandering of a line, with moments of pausing upon a new discovery that once had a place in the city, carefully sorting and weaving fragments together.
Essay
Sarah Christie
Sarah Christie is a London-based artist, writer and educator. Her embodied practice uses clay as a primary, and primal, material for sensing, thinking, moving and making with. She invites correspondence and collaboration with other people, places, forms and materials, to create work that may be impermanent, interdisciplinary, slow-growing and cyclical. This ‘call-and-response’ approach aims to allow uncertainty and create space for unexpected outcomes to emerge.
Sarah has exhibited in group and solo exhibitions in the UK and internationally, including at London’s Southwark Cathedral, OVADA in Oxford, the British Ceramics Biennial in Stoke-on-Trent and at Industry City, Brooklyn.
Sarah’s writing has been published in the Journal of Australian Ceramics, online zine ‘What About Clay?’ and in fellow artists’ exhibition catalogues. She teaches at Central Saint Martins, UAL, and is a visiting artist at Imperial College London and King’s College.