"Sometimes, you encounter a body of water so beautiful you commit it to memory. But what happens as memory meets hands, fire, and water?"
Glass artist Celia Dowson and ceramicist Chloé Rosetta Bell present a collaborative collection that ex-plores this meeting of memory, material, fluidity and time, creating pieces that recall impressions and visible traces imprinted within the landscape. For Dowson the exploration of form, colour and depth in glass opens up a contemplative space for viewers to reflect upon the rhythms of the atmosphere; for Bell, shell and ash surfaces evolve on clay as vehicles to hold memories of her bodily experience in the land.
"When Celia and I began shaping the concept for 'Traces', I didn't anticipate how deeply that question would come to resonate. In these final months of my pregnancy, I've found myself less able to walk longer distances and make the journey down the cliffs. What was once a simple path has become a memory - recalled through sounds of the land and the weight of object carried back to the studio. As I work with shells, seaweed, fragments of landfall, I can still hear the water. It rushes along the cliffs, murmuring through a mossy hollow that holds a swamp-like pool, before pouring into the open sea. The same ocean flow - persistent and unseen - caused by the landslip of 1928. I keep a photograph of the land here taken in 1922, just six years before the collapse, showing the road that once traced its way beneath the cliffs.
Chloé Bell 2025