The Outline of Colour: Anna Silverton

Over the years Anna Silverton has become increasingly regarded as a leading figure in the world of ceramics in Britain for her refined porcelains, always aiming at the purest of forms.  In this new body of work, the artist has played with ceramic pigments in the form of metal oxides and saturated glaze-stains to produce complex graduations of colour.  Some gradients capture the transition from the cool, introspective nature of deep blue to the organic, invigorating essence of yellow-green. Others merge black and orange with pigment seepage at the edges, or are pure vibrance of yellow, orange, and burgundy, indigo and others. The result is a transformation in real time embedded by fire.

Anna Silverton's secrets stand in the balance of volume, colour and proportion of pure forms emerging from the finest surface of porcelain and the radiance of her glazes.  The lines are all curves dancing in waves and inversions from the base to the edges.  The symmetry she is looking for is bringing together profuseness of shape, defiance of gravity, and effulgence of colour, into one volumetric and chromatic reality. The simpler the work the more complex it becomes.  The artist seeks for the object to stand entirely by itself as sculpture in any given environment.  These porcelains are works of art disguised as domestic objects, with all the attributes of functional vessels, vases and jars.  Their symbolic functionality is in an intimate complicity with home as an environment, where every dimensionality is defined by purpose.  And as a result, the work has reached its ultimate goal, to be a work of art and inhabit the everyday.