Elspeth Owen is a radical, entirely original ceramic artist. Her artistic work has grown out of her position as a feminist and member of many environmental movements. These have stretched, from CND in the 1960s, to Greenham Common in the 1980s, to Extinction Rebellion today.
Originally Elspeth Owen studied history at Oxford University and then worked as an academic, a social worker and a teacher. She says that Simon Nicholson’s legendary Open University course ‘Art and Environment’ served as her art school training. She then came to pottery via evening classes in the mid-seventies. Elspeth Owen showed a body of work as part of GroundWork’s exhibition, Fragile Nature, in 2019. She showed her work alongside French-Spanish Artist, Paca Sanchez, and we have a wonderful picture on that exhibition page of the two artists doing a little dance together as they discovered that they were exactly the same age.
Elspeth Owen ’s feminism and ritual
‘I have been a feminist since the time when it was called being a member of the Women’s Liberation Movement. And a peace protester since the Aldermarston Marches and Greenham Common.’
Elspeth Owen describes joining the Women’s Liberation Movement as coinciding with her realisation that she could become a potter. While she says her work itself was never political, she finds many ways to combine the rites of passage of femininity with a kind of ritual politics. Her practice plays with contrasts of fragility and strength, paralleled with a feminist’s interpretation of nature, community and ritual.
Menopouse Pot goes to the Victoria and Albert Museum
Elspeth Owen has her studio near Cambridge in the former Granchester village cricket pavilion. It is a convivial place, well-known to her regular coterie of close followers. There she regularly hosts open days and relies on sales there locally. She has a truly alternative sensibility and has always refused to be taken up by the commercial gallery system. She loves to involve a wider community wherever possible.
When the Victoria and Albert Museum bought a major piece of hers, ‘Menopause Pot’, in 2019, she delivered it by hand herself. She was accompanied along Exhibition Road in South Kensington by a whole band of friends. They had been detailed to make as much noise as possible, banging wooden spoons on saucepans and other household implements to celebrate their arrival at the museum. It was a joyous occasion as they were greeted at the door by the curator for the official handover. The whole ceremony was filmed by James Murray White.
Creativity in a still quiet place….
“Creativity happens for me both in a still quiet place at home and a wider place where I take my clay objects to interact with other people and environments. Because I am towards the end of my working life, I am deeply engrossed in thinking that brings my own decay into relation with the decay of wider natural systems and leaves me very conscious of shared cyclical patterns and the ephemeral character of our labours”
“While being a climate change activist, currently with Defend our Juries, I am very sanguine about the potential we have to continue comforting ourselves by using the raw materials of our planet with skill and ardour.
“I especially want to be part of GROUNDWORK’s new network because I have been inspired by the exhibitions and seminars that Veronica has already curated. I also very much admire the resourceful ways she finds to further links between us and keep the gallery afloat!”
