With a background in environmentalism, education and community support, the need for meaningful purpose in my art practice runs deep.  Much of my work centres around notions of connection and the ways and means by which individuals belong within a group or place   Our situation within the local and global ecosystem, and how to urgently foster a more equitable and sustainable future for all, dominates my thinking.

 

I work in a range of media and with a flexible approach: participation; ceramics; text; installation; craft; video; sound ... I am endlessly intrigued by the transformative properties of clay, and its narrative ability to carry the process-marks of making and maker; its connection to the Earth is also of great significance. I move between conceptual, poetic arrangements, to creating forms with a more a practical basis.

 

Recent projects have particularly focussed on exploring the experience, metaphors and relational aspects of breathing and breath, through ceramics, sound, video and leaf-masks. 

 

Current projects engage with participants and are works in progress: 

Enough seeks to explore what different people mean by this word, through conversation and ceramic modelling, and how negotiating this variation of viewpoints may affect all our futures. ​

We Breathe Trees is a developing body of work which has encompassed meditative making, craftivist activism and street art.  It highlights our dependence on, and interconnections within, nature; the leaf-masks I and others have made clearly reference today's pervasive crises of air pollution, ecological breakdown and Covid. 

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Since completing a degree in Fine-Art in 2020, I have been working alongside other Bristol and South Western creatives, to establish a regional network for Culture Declares Emergency; a community of artists & cultural sector organisations that have pledged to address the Climate & Ecological Emergency through their practice and networks.  My DECLARATION is here.

 

My creative journey was the focus of a piece on women re-finding to their artistic self, after pursuing other careers or raising a family - Earth Mother: Gaby Solly on Art and the Environment.  I am also a singer/songwriter. Check out Zendium Moon to find out more.