Charlotte Walker Art Foundation Degree

 Whether consciously or not, as creatives, we reflect the world we live in through our art with influences from the political climate and ongoing societal shifts. Personally I feel that my art is being driven by environmental concerns and the increasing pressures to live sustainably, which is why I have been trying to use natural resources and second hand materials whenever possible. Christian Boltanski, born in 1944, was a French artist and sculptor. His father was Jewish and escaped being captured by the nazis by hiding under floorboards; having grown up with this knowledge, Boltanski's work potently references the holocaust and reflects how deeply he was affected by his early experiences of wartime, shaping his life and identity. This is described in an article by Jan Garden Castro, who writes:  'For Boltanski, memory and history are dark shadows of each other – neither mirroring each other nor expressing the “truth.” '  https://sculpture.org/blogpost/1810776/349149/Chri

Nick Rands Earthly Spheres , 1999 This work by Nick Rands features 4000 hand-shaped spheres of mud that he has collected while travelling the path of a river. I think it's amazing how many different shades there are and mud isn't something we would usually pay much attention to - let alone see beauty in - so I think Rands has done a really effective job of transforming and elevating this material into something really spectacular. They also remind me of the variety in skin colours among humans and how no two are exactly the same, but we all share the same world. It's interesting to see that there are some cooler shades among the spheres like the purplish ones, they look quite unusual and it makes me wonder what's in them that makes them so different to the rest. I found this work really relevant to my project and inspiring too - I felt really excited to work with natural materials that I'd gathered myself because I'd seen how well it worked for Nick Rands. Diggi

This project felt like a really good exploration of materials and making things from scratch. When we visited Newstead for the first time, the story that struck me the most was how the Mahogany furniture was a product of the slave trade, and that the felling of trees caused even further suffering when floods hit and there were no natural defences to protect native communities. The idea of flooding and taking natural resources is what lead me to the river, but first I had to research the local geology to find out if there was clay that I could dig.  Going out and discovering it was really exciting and it felt surreal to find actual clay out in the wild, I knew straight away when I saw the a redness in the earth on the embankment that there was iron rich clay there, and I want to acknowledge my partner Matt Smith who was a massive help on this expedition. I enjoyed the hands-on process of cleaning the clay, removing each little root that had infiltrated it over time. Digging the clay and

When we went to Newstead Abbey to set up our work, I wanted to place mine on a mahogany surface to reference where the idea of my project originally came from. I also found that the shiny, reflective surface of the wood was a good way to highlight the crudeness of materials that I had used, and the kind of grittiness compared to the smooth table. The way the pots reflect in the glossy surface gives the objects some extra emphasis and it reminds me of water, again linking to the ideas behind the work.  They are placed in the Grand Drawing room, which also contains various pianos, a large number of ornamental furniture and large portraits hanging on the walls. It looked like a place of entertainment and indulgence, where I imagine residents and guests would engage in blissful ignorance towards how any of the luxury possessions came to be there.  

James the ceramics technician threw 8 more pots out of my remaining clay and I glazed half of them so that I have a variety of different shades, from the darker glazed ones to the lighter ones that were only fired once. There is also a size variation because the glazed ones shrink a little bit due to being fired twice, and I don't want each one to be identical because that would remove the hand-made style that I'm looking for. I really want the human aspect to be emphasised because this is what got lost Newstead's mahogany furniture - the work that went into it and the brutal suffering of the enslaved people in the Caribbean (and other areas native to the mahogany tree) is invisible.