Magic and Materiality

New Sculptures - 2024

'Pressé', Stoneware Ceramic, Bottom Trawler Tyres, 25 x 25 x 30cm, 2024

'Cormelian', Stoneware, Hawthorn, Birch plywood, H 150cm x W 52cm x D 54cm, 2023

The writer and activist Rebecca Solnit has written that to walk in the world, you can 'find what you don't know you are looking for.' You discover when you walk that it emancipates you from space and time, which perhaps is demonstrated by Doug Burton's sculpture. The shape has strong figurative overtones: it has legs, after all. To describe it as a figure would be to go too far. Instead, 'Cormelian' is a composite - of materials and shapes, and thus of origins. It looks constructed, with cut blocks but also with curved, organic, green elements, it may be part-human and part-tree. So the imagination takes off on an imaginative journey of speculation. Its title suggests an adjective that people in West Cornwall might recognise as echoing the name Cormoran. The biggest of giants, he lived in the forest where birds, animals and probably humans cohabited before the flood came to cover it with Mount's Bay.
Martin Holman ©2023

'Cormelian' emerges from an assemblage of parts, a branch from a tree transforms into legs, and the extrusion of clay cylinders grows from the stump animated by the essence within the forms. The sculpture plays with the act of making, a response to the movement around and through fables and places. The stories of ancient giants inhabit this _land, opening another realm. 'The Giant's Well' accompanies the magic of matter and folklore, a place found on the path to St Michael's, pierced and embedded with the history of the landscape, the vessel strains against the pressure of standing.

Persian Fire, 2023, Stoneware, slip, iron ore, H42cm x W15cm x D15cm

Saxon, 2023, Stoneware, Steel, Cliff Stone, Iron Ore, Slip, H 24cm x W 15cm x D 15cm