THE WALL OF A THOUSAND STORIES

Ceramic installation for the Children's Library at the Royal Jubille Library, Brighton.

- Made over a period of a year and a half 2003-2004

- Comprises 91 wall pieces that are hung on the back wall of the children's library space. The wall is 16 meters by 8 meters.

-Commissioned as an interactive wall from which to tell stories.

-The idea is to chose three items from the wall and improvise the telling a story using them. I came up with this idea whilst telling my daughter Scarlet "stories from my throat" ( as she called them).. we would chose three things, anything really, say a light bulb, a hammer and a chair, and then I would tell a story to her straight from the top of my head.. I would start, not knowing how it would develop, but just trusting that a story would appear and usually one would. I try to stitch in elements or lessons that I wanted her to learn about ..being kind to others, crossing the road carefully, not eating berries in the garden, learning something current to her education..

-I applied for this commission from a notice that Brighton Council posted in AN News, an artists newsletter.

-The budget was £40,000. It was to include all production, transport, installation and wall treatments.

- Four or five artists were selected from a postal application, and happily I was finally chosen for this site of the library.

-My idea was to have a selection of pieces spread across the wall like an asteroid shower.

-Once my idea was chosen the library gave me thirty subjects that they wanted me to cover, for example food, music, school, tools, space, dwellings.

-Each piece is approx 50 cm, I designed this piece in such a way as to be able to make a lot of it in my small kiln in Franceas I had two studios at the time and wanted to spend time in the country with my daughter..

- I worked closely with the help of assistant Laila Page on this project. Laila had recently finished a Fine Arts Degree at Farnham UK. Pieces were made and bisc fired in France, then transported to London to my big kiln for the glaze firings.

-Each piece is hand modelled from a solid lump of soft material clay, when stiff enough turned over and hollowed out from the back with wire loops, then put back to face up and finished carefully to a smooth surface, and dried very slowly so as not to bend. The glazes are high fired crystalline glazes to 1260 degrees centigrade.

-It was a great technical challenge to make these and keep them perfectly flat during the high firings. This glaze is especially difficult to use as it runs like thin liquid in the kiln at top temperatures.

-Each piece was hung to the wall using wall bolts, wires and flexible silicone adhesive, so that there is a safety mechanism should one of the hanging methods fail.

I feel this is the most successful of my public pieces, it had other people help in the design process, it was versatile until the last moment of hanging, and it remains a tool used in an interactive way by the public. I enjoyed working with Laila Page very much and I felt that the technical challenge was a real education for us, and best of all I think it works well within the given space as it looks good and also makes what is a quite narrow space seem more deep and generous.`