Of Place
Our connections to place are deeply embedded and fundamentally inform how we perceive our environment. Open to multiple meanings and interpretations, place is something known, but difficult to explain; physical and imagined, spatial and temporal, emotional and sensual.
This work explores attachment to and engagement with place through the medium of ceramics. A wayfaring engagement with Slievenamuck Hill in the Glen of Aherlow, Co. Tipperary and the matter found here – organic, ceramic, animal and anthropological - acts as an anchor line for this investigation.
Paths are explored and materials are gathered, tested and manipulated. Created exclusively from materials collected onsite, primal forms evolve from the place itself, responding to temporal and physical diversities in the obtainable gathered materials.
While ceramics is often valued for its resistance to the effects of time, this work instead acknowledges the ephemeral qualities of place. As a location changes each time we encounter it and is never finished, so these pieces evolve from their unfired to fired forms and beyond, questioning the notion of a finished piece and instead embracing change and evolution in all its guises.
Biography
Mandy is a Tipperary based ceramicist and lecturer in ceramics at Limerick School of Art and Design.
On graduating from Cardiff School of Art and Design with a degree in Ceramics in 1994, she worked as a studio potter in Co. Wexford before establishing her studio in the Glen of Aherlow Co. Tipperary in 1999. From 2006 to 2016, Mandy specialised in wood-fired salt glazed stoneware ceramics. Her current work explores perspectives on place through using ceramic, organic and anthropological found materials.
With work in several major collections, including the Department of Foreign Affairs Embassies collection, Ulster Museum and FuLe International Ceramic Art Museums, China, Mandy exhibits nationally and internationally. In 2010 she completed an MA at the University of Limerick and is currently finalising a PhD investigating perspectives on place. She is a member of the International Academy of Ceramics (Mandy Parslow (aic-iac.org).