In December 2024 I was commissioned to create a site-specific temporary community artwork for Ayscoughfee Hall in Spalding, Lincolnshire. Commissions were sought for The Canal, a 300 year old water feature in Grade 1 Listed Ayscoughfee Hall’s historic gardens.
Funded by Storytellers, East & South Lincolnshire’s Arts Council England National Portfolio Organisation, the work was to be installed for the two-day Ayscoughfee Enlightenment event in March 2025.
The installation of floating ceramic cubes in The Canal took inspiration from the popularity of Blue and White ceramics of the Georgian era, which often depict people and animals at leisure in a landscape. The cubes re-imagine the visual spectacle of a Pleasure Garden in multiple drawings made by visitors to Ayscoughfee Hall during a February half-term workshop programme, immortalising the Enlightenment aspirations of the pursuit of knowledge and personal freedom.
Workshop attendees used ceramic underglazes to paint over their drawings and these were allowed to dry. Back in my studio I damped down these hand-painted underglaze transfers and applied them to raw clay cubes, before firing them.
If we know one thing, it is that pottery in water must sink. But such rules can be occasionally suspended, if physics takes control. During the Age of Enlightment Isaac Newton’s Laws of Motion explained such things and thus, ceramic objects can be made to float.
The Age of Enlightment was a time of thinking, and of freedom of expression. Visitors to a Georgian Pleasure Garden were in pursuit of fun and a brief suspension of social conventions, with the chance to enjoy imaginative performances and experiences in a beautiful open-air setting.
For the Ayscoughfee Enlightenment, participants’ original artwork immortalised ideas about the Georgian Pleasure Garden on high-fired ceramic for posterity.