Friday, October 21st, 2016

A fine porcelain ceramicist’s celebration of land, sea and lace

Autumn-winter exhibition

15th October – 22nd  December 2016

For our next exhibition at the White Fox Gallery, Frances Wilson, fine porcelain ceramicist, who hails all the way from the island of Unst in Shetland, will be crossing the seas and travelling the whole length of the country, to bring, to Coldstream, on the very southern edge of Scotland, striking evocations of the country’s northernmost geography and soul.

Frances originally trained as a painter at the prestigious Gray’s School of Art in Aberdeen. Over time, she turned to fine porcelain ceramic to best express her love of both the rugged rocky Shetland’s shoreline and of the feminine aesthetics embodied by the Unst tradition of fine lace making.

Paying homage to the generations of toiling women of old, who still managed to integrate the pursuit of fine lace knitting in their many daily chores and thus keeping one of the many rich Shetland crafts alive, Frances’s work is also a quiet reflection on the landscape, and the plant lives of Shetland’s shores. It is not surprising therefore to find that some of her creations combine the flowing lines of seaweeds with those of the fine lace patterns displayed by the Unst fine ‘cobweb’ knitted lace. In doing so, she celebrates, at one and the same time, human lives and the natural world.

Despite the complexity of the process and the richness of her motifs, Frances’ work remains exquisitely ethereal and effortlessly elegant ; a wonderful celebration of feminine aesthetics, beautifully balanced at times by a hint of masculinity in the sharpness of her edges, in praise of the island’s craggy shores.

Due to the delicate nature of her work, Frances’s artworks are primarily sold from the White Fox Gallery premises, although it would still be possible for certain pieces to be shipped by courier.  Please enquire. You can view examples of her artworks for sale, in our Shop’s Guest Artists page.