‘Seafarers’ is the first artwork created as part of my Lossenham residency. It’s mostly ceramic, created from the natural clay deposits at Lossenham.

Russell Burden, Lossenham’s resident artist and Philip Warren a medieval ceramics expert had already started exploring and categorising the many types of clay deposited at Lossenham, research seeking to gain an understanding of the medieval use of ceramics at the Carmelite Priory, and culminated in the firing of ceramic vessels and pots in a recreated medieval open ditch kiln.

Russell supplied me with some of the many coloured clays he and Philip had gathered from different locations around the Priory site and also a number of coloured slips made from foraged minerals. As with seafarers II the sculpture is an abstract representation of the arrival of the Carmelite founders to Lossenham, arriving by boat along the river Rother. To reflect the early christian element the masts has three early nails braised in the form of a cross, representing the nails that held Christ to the cross. Made of iron, the mast and nails take us further back in time to Lossenham’s Iron age settlement and the working of iron at Lossenham as does the sculpture’s heavy ironstone plinth.