Our featured Artist Member for April 2024 is Merseyside-based mixed media artist Anne Knight.
Anne’s work explores shape, form, colour and expressive mark making, inspired by architecture and mid-century textile design. She experiments extensively with colourful surfaces in both textiles and ceramics, often transferring design ideas from one medium to another. Drawing upon her visual influences from everyday life, she intuitively develops playful surfaces – a personal visual language which ranges from simple line illustration to bold abstract patterns. Anne graduated from Liverpool Hope University in 2020: as an emerging artist, she continues to strive to build on her knowledge and making skills in both ceramic and textile design, enjoying the processes and seeing her work evolve and develop.
As a maker of ceramics and surface pattern designer, my work is very much inspired by mid-century textile design, architecture and coastal and country landscapes. As a mixed media artist, I design digitally printed fabrics which I use to make my handmade lampshades and I use slab-building techniques to make my ceramic vessels. I also draw inspiration from what I see in everyday life such as the different shapes of inanimate objects, buildings, the marks made on pavements and the patterns and colours that can be seen everywhere.
My studio is a bright, cosy, converted summer house at the end of my garden. It is crammed full of art materials such as clay, underglazes, drawing and painting materials, fabrics, printing tools, wood and canvases so I need to be really organised and tidy as I adapt my workspace between making messy ceramics to needing a clean space to make my lampshades. My studio allows me the personal space to sketch ideas and experiment with whatever material I want to at any given time, allowing me much creative freedom.
A difficult question to answer as I don’t have a favourite piece of work, but I am often amazed that am able to hand-build a large ceramic pot out of a lump of clay using minimal tools such as a rolling pin, a tape measure and a knife. I enjoy decorating the surfaces of my ceramics, spontaneously applying colourful underglazes using a variety of tools and I can often lose myself whilst creating the digital drawings and designs I use for my lampshades. I enjoy the variety of visual effects that can be achieved using technology which can influence my decorating style and spark off new ideas.
I am inspired by many artists from many eras, but I am mostly influenced by 1950’s textile designers Lucienne Day and Jaquline Groag for their stylised, bright and colourful surface designs. Also, artists such as Picasso, Kandinsky, Klee and Miro for their use of bold colours and quirky, abstract drawings. Current day artists include ceramicists Barry Stedman for his spontaneous painterly surface designs and Craig Underhill for his abstract and textural representation of the Cornish coastal landscape. I feel these artists have a wonderful refreshing and contemporary approach to surface design and making.
A collection of Anne’s ceramics are available to purchase in the gallery and via our online shop.