“…the essential relation, in a world of life, is not between matter and form, or between substance and appearance, but between materials and forces.”
(Deleuze & Guattari 2004: 377)
Caithness holds a textural imprint of time within its geology. During my time exploring the coast I found myself looking closely at the marks and traces inscribed in the landscape. Water and wind are ways I have observed these expressions, the forms we see having taken shape over time. Rugged rocks jut out from the cliff edge and emerge from the sea. A waterfall is made airborne by the wind, turning to mist, seemingly dissolving into the atmosphere. At dawn and dusk the ocean glows, a basin of blue, glittering, air rippling across its surface. The landscape continues to move, erode, unfurl, reshape, creating visible traces which imprint themselves into the landscape. They are given shape by the often-unseen forces which define the transient, atmospheric qualities of Caithness. It has been through these details that I feel I can sense a wholeness of the landscape, a vessel of time in continual transition… a place to connect with the past, still alive in the landscape and continuing to fold into the present.
Just as the landscape has been formed through materials and forces, objects too are defined by the process of their creation. The vessels in this collection have been formed using a lathe to turn wax, a pottery wheel to throw clay, and silicon to hold the gestures and textural details of these techniques. Within the overall collection the variations in texture, glass flow, colour, and opacity are an exploration of the presence of motion within materials. Just as flow and force have defined the character of Caithness, so too do they define the characteristics seen within the material depths of glass.
Celia Dowson is a British artist and graduate of the Royal College of Art, where she specialised in both ceramics and cast glass. She received an MA from the Royal College of Art and a BA Honors in ceramic design from University of the Arts London, Central Saint Martins. Dowson was a recipient of the Franz Rising Star Award in 2019, the Charlotte Fraser Award from the Royal College of Art in 2018, and was a Tom Helme Scholar, Queen Elizabeth Scholarship Trust, in 2017. Her work was included in Future Heritage at Decorex International and can be found in the permanent collections of the New Taipei City Yingge Ceramics Museum in Taiwan and the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. Dowson is a Tutor in the ceramics and glass department at the Royal College of Art.