Tag: sculpture

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29 Oct

The value of ‘Home Work’

I couldn’t be in Derby last week as I had to go home to work and earn some money. I also had my 'Domestic Dystopias' paintings on show. 'Domestic Dystopias' are a colourful series of large paintings using bitumen paint that are about homes, women, children. Intended to be dark and funny, I realise I’m not entirely happy with the overdramatic use of ‘dystopias’. I had merely wanted to question ideality in the home and play with the opposite of Utopia. So I asked: ‘What lies in between ‘utopia’ and ‘dystopia’? My husband said: ‘Everyday life’. Not such a catchy title though.

artcore studio figure making

Today I just want to be able to sit in the studio and make new work. I’m still surprised sometimes that I make figurative work yet figures ‘perform’ in ways that I can’t. We feel,  empathise and respond to the movements and gestures of other humans - and I think to mimetic sculpture and drawings too. The small clay figures take a long time to create. They must ‘fit’ an object and tell a story of their own. The figures can be kitsch, classic, awkward, fragmented yet the stoneware clay always has a classy aesthetic - once fired.

small clay figure with hands outstretched

These small sculptures do not illustrate the stories literally. They might link or be inspired by stories that I am collecting from people about their domestic lives

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Categories: Delpha Hudson
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window reflection on cabinet displaying paper red rigind hood theatre in pickfords museum derby
04 Oct

Objects that light and give comfort to our spaces

We recently moved to a small village in Cornwall where news and gossip travels fast. One of our neighbours passes our house regularly, stopping we are sure to collect any gossip about us that she can share in the local shop. Since she has a zimmer frame and she moves extremely quickly onto the shop after talking to us, so our nick-name for her is ‘hot wheels’.

We also have meaningful conversations with ‘hot wheels’, as although she plugs us for information we manage to change the subject. One day when she was talking about our new home and how we were settling in, she said “home is where you are understood.”

This evening finding time to relax in front of what I call ‘sad telly’ - there was a scene where the main character returns home and sees the old teapot her mother has on the table. She asks why she still has it. Her mother replies “Nothing says home like that old teapot”.

Visiting Derby Museum and Pickford’s Museum this week, I enjoyed some of the objects and the idea that much of this particular display was selected by people from Derby.

text in cabinet at derby museu, 'object that lith our space and bring comfort to places'

Tim Shore’s exhibition throws up stories in contemplating ‘Derby Meantime’. Little Red Riding Hood in the paper theatre display is a story that is never threadbare no matter how it is multiplied, mutilated and retold. We tell

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Categories: Delpha Hudson, Home Residency
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28 Sep

Figuring value

I travelled home today. I live in West Cornwall, very near Land’s End. At home I gazed at the garden sculpture we inherited when we moved in – the bits we didn’t give away like the dogs and pigs. The classical figures of women with their patina of age have a certain charm though I am seeing them today with new eyes. One of women, their arms alluringly raised, supporting a bird bath, another, a woman in classical dress reaching over. Just like everyone I take for granted that this is the way that sculpture portrays women.

Derby war memorial sculpture of woman holding a baby white statue of l

The public sculpture in Derby that I’ve seen so far includes the typical heroic male (Bonnie Prince Charlie) and the charming ‘Boy with a Goose’ but also some women. Unusually the war memorial is a woman holding a baby. War memorials mostly represent those that died, not the women that bore sons who went off to war so it is a touching tribute. I also found Florence Nightingale on the side of a building. I was glad to find these two tributes to women, - even if there are 3 other men commemorated around the opposite side of the building to Florence, reflecting the usual gender inequality when it comes to civic statues.

What is the significance of monuments? Do we think differently about our lives when

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Categories: Delpha Hudson
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28 Aug

Material Traces in Derby

Returning to Derby to undertake the Artcore No Matter How Strong Residency I was interested in how I could re-root myself in the landscape of Derby. Having moved from Derbyshire ten years prior the city centre felt full of ghosts; half-forgotten memories and uncanny recollections of streets and other open spaces. As an entry way I began developing a fieldwork method of research. Following routes and pathways through the city I found respite by the river edge and began to think about the intergenerational relationship of early settlers also coming to the river, interacting with the same site and mud, the same material heritage. I went to Derby Museum and learnt through material fragments about early settlers and the development of Derby as a city, how layers of mud have held onto memories. These excavations have enabled us to trace the land through forgotten tools and drawings left in dwellings. As someone who works with clay and pottery, remnants of early pottery vessels connected my process to early ancestors, working through the ground their skills and techniques have been passed down into the way my fingers shape clay today. Metal working further rooted my material practice, connecting my sculptural material to land extraction and alchemy, and closer still to my grandads work at Stanton Iron Works in the 1970’s and 80’s after moving to England. A fragment of a carved monument encouraged me to consider the hands which had so carefully chosen this stone, taken it from the earth and skilfully
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Categories: Artist, Charlotte Cullen, Residency6:No matter how strong
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