Ceramicist Patricia Volk offers a compelling exploration of scale and volume with new energetic vigour. Pushing the clay and her technique of slab -building to the limit, ‘Construction’ explores this new departure with big,  bold and brightly painted ceramics that combine singular elements to form exciting dialogues. 

Volk’s work explores the relationship between form and colour. Born in Belfast, Northern Ireland, Volk always felt an affinity to art but was denied the opportunity and support to apply to art school. 20 years later and after a successful career in advertising, Volk sat down one night to sketch. Within a year she has applied to study ceramic design and the rest is history.

Volk prefers not to meditate on the construction of her works before she creates. Instead preferring to assemble shapes and lines as she goes, enjoying the organic formations which her sculpture’s find. Colour too is an important concept to Volk who prefers to take inspiration from the bright and bold colours of the past.

Of her practice Patricia Volk states: “As a sculptor I love working with the directness of clay, using all the techniques, coiling and slab building, making one-off pieces, which are fired then finished with acrylic paint. Classical sculpture was always highly coloured but we have this erroneous idea that they were all white and sterile looking.

My obsession as an artist is catching a very simple form or line, then enhancing it with colour. Sometimes these are juxtapositions that I hope suggest contradictions of strength and fragility, stability and precariousness – like the relationships between human beings.

But also of rest and activity, grace and motion, that give an object a lively presence and a sense of individual character. But really all this is open to the eye of the beholder. I never want to be too prescriptive, and in saying this much I’ve probably said too much.”

Construction // Patricia Volk // represented by Pangolin London gallery // London, UK // Image: Patricia Volk, Construction (2), 2021. Painted Ceramic 64 x 115 x 60 cm 25 1/4 x 45 1/4 x 23 5/8 in

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