Artists team up for exhibition

Hampshire’s Moya Tosh and Berkshire’s Sally Courage, Christine Lack and Teresa Munn, are united by their love of the natural world and the organic feel of clay.

The shapes, colours and textures of nature provide a common thread for their work but the variety of forms, glazes and techniques they use demonstrate a very personal and individual interpretation and response to what they see around them.

Sally Courage is guided by the need to produce a satisfying form for her pieces. She makes large abstract pots, loosely based on natural forms.

They often appear organic in their final shape and she feels their big size provides more opportunity for the pots to grow and develop. Recently birds have provided her inspiration.

Christine Lack has been exploring natural shapes in the landscape since childhood, collecting shells, stones and fossils whenever she could.

She creates fine, delicate forms in stoneware and porcelain and layers them with colour and texture, using burnishing, resist and smoke-firing techniques.

Teresa Munn is captivated by both rural landscape and the shoreline beauty of the south coast. Her work aims to create “a sense of place” and “capture a moment”.

She incorporates verse and text into her pieces, using slip-trailing on hand-built porcelain forms.

Moya Tosh has been studying how the rural landscape changes through the seasons and her current work focuses on how it is “scored and scarred by stark ‘lines’ cutting across its undulations and curves - tractor tracks in fields of crops, frozen lines in winter puddles.”

She emphasises the tension created by these lines and curves using cutting, piercing and wire thread in her thrown stoneware and porcelain pieces.

The exhibition will run at the Red Steps Gallery in Whitway, Newbury, from October 9-11 between 10am and 4pm each day.

Red Steps Gallery is the white house between the Carnarvon Arms and Highclere Castle.