Simon Fell East Sussex, United Kingdom

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I make ceramics, draw, and curate. I create figures and structures that evoke personal and common paradoxes. The work is broadly figurative. My work has a strong experimental process behind it, whatever I plan the work may not conform to my original map.

I work with clay because it is such a responsive material. It is a pleasure to work with a medium that does (almost) what you want. Clay can be moulded when it is soft, when pressed it holds the shape you give it, when it dries to a leather-hard state it can be worked like soft wood or plaster, carved, cut and re-joined in sheets, tubes or hollow forms of any kind. My works carry myriad uncertainties rather than single meanings, allowing viewers to discover their own connections. My physical discovery process creates genuine ambiguity and richness – authentic complexity that emerges from real making. In our increasingly digital world, my artwork offers rare encounters with something genuinely made and discovered rather than designed and predetermined. I work with drawing because it is so immediate and responsive to impulse. I do a lot of fast portrait drawing with DrawingisFree which gets each week off to a flying and productive start.

What is really interesting to me about this medium is what to make of it in the contemporary world. Both the fine art and ceramic traditions are in a constant state of flux and their historic purposes in question. Clay sculpture sits uneasily between the fields of art and craft but this is only to be expected, the material will take whatever meaning you give it, it is receptive and open, it does what it's told, the question then is, where do you show your work to allow it to tell it's own story?