Elaine Hind

Throughout my practice as an artist I am driven by an obsessive love of plant structures in all their stages from seedling to desiccated husk or seed head.  I love simple strong shapes which allow met to use their surface tas a canvas on which I can draw.  My work is always porcelain sometimes with additions of glass or metal, and best described as semi-functional or non-functional, though the many vases I make all work. Since childhood I have always loved lanterns and specific lights which give rooms a magical appearance. I spent a period concentrating on developing a range of sculptural lamps which have this transformative quality, each one a 'one off', some combining glass 'seeds'. I have now moved on to concentrating on producing a range of work, usually vessels which are more about the surface. All the work is fired to stoneware temperature and glazed with matt soft colours. Over the years sources of inspiration have been the wonderful Victorian flower modellers, whilst more recently I have been much more involved with using the surface of my work as a surface for drawing. carving and building up pattern and texture. I am as likely to be inspired by the flower drawings of Charles Rennie Makintosh or Leonardo Da Vici's plant studies, and love old botanical illustrations. I collect books of these and other plant illustrators and am more likely to be inspired by them than by the work of other potters. I usually prefer to have a plant, often dead and dried out in front of me, and have boxes and boxes of collected seed heads and objects trouve in the natural world line. I trained at Birmingham College of Art and have been a Lecturer at Bournville School of Art, now UCE. I retired as Head of 3D Foundation Department in 2005 to concentrate on my own work. Elaine Hind's lamps are included in the new book from A&C Black, Ceramics with Mixed Media by Joy Bosworth. Elaine Hind's lamps are featured in a new book published by Black Dog Publishing, 2007 Breaking The Mould