“Mum and I would scour beaches looking for curios, such as fragments of pottery, shells, and particularly sea glass. My mother also had a knack for uncovering historic rubbish dumps and instilled in me this love of looking and finding – I like to call it slow meditative scouring,” says Katie.
The family moved to Glasgow when Katie was 17 and having long aspired to go to Glasgow School of Art, she undertook a degree course in Sculpture and Environmental Art and graduated in 2017 with First Class Honours in Sculpture. “When I was in third year GSA acquired a kiln – and I quickly became hooked on clay and its endless possibilities. After graduating, my dad and I built my garden studio and Manifesto was born.
“The name represents a groundwork for new ideas and action, prompting connections with like-minded people,” she adds. Her work has to date been exhibited at The Royal Scottish Academy and The Ingram Collection in London.
Katie’s inspiration comes primarily from the landscape around her studio or on visits to beaches where she mudlarks for anything from ancient artefacts to sea creatures, fossils, stones, shells, feathers, and general flotsam and jetsam.
“So many things – above and below ground – inspire me, and I love having a free rein to play with clay and see where it takes me and what come out of it.” The problem with being a mudlarker and gatherer of curious objects is what to do with them.
Many people keep beach finds in a glass jar, but Katie has a more artistic solution she calls Curiosity Clouds: the cloud being a unique sculptural form made up of numerous niches, each one serving as a tiny shelf upon which to display a foraged find.
The catalyst for these Curiosity Clouds, came from a visit to Glasgow’s Hunterian Museum, where in amongst a display case of insect and bird nests from around the world, Katie spotted a cross-section of a termite mound, which exposed an elaborate network of tunnels and compartments termites use for ventilation and navigation.
Working from the centre outward using terracotta crank clay, each of Katie’s Curiosity Clouds (priced from £200 up to £500) has its own unique appearance and size and is coated in slip to achieve a variety of earthy hues.
“Arranging found curios in each compartment is a return to childhood playdays, carefully placing each exhibit in its new space, like a curator in a museum,” she says.
Mycelium candleholders are another eye-catching fusion of form and function.
Manifesto’s range is expansive and includes a recent exploration into tableware following a six-week Anagama firing residency at Shiro Oni Studios in the Gunma prefecture in Japan, which culminated in an exhibition of functional tableware mimicking the shapes of petals and leaves, also a series of ceramic platters, dishes and bowls, pinched from balls of dark red clay.
Katie’s ceramics can be purchased from Bard in Leith (www.bard-scotland.com) and periodically direct from her workshop in the southside of Glasgow.
