Gaila Clarke Hall

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Warp weft stitch thread 2021

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Gaila studied sculpture at Camberwell Art School followed by stone carving in Italy.  Latterly she has turned to ceramics.

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Working in her studio designed and built for her by her son and architect, Myshkin Clarke Hall, Gaila has a deep awareness of its natural setting and the slow process of hand building - pinching, coiling, scraping and shaping works in accord with the life of the woods that surround her.  Living a mainly solitary life, Gaila likes to have her roots in silence.  Within its quiet, the ambiguities of presence and absence, form and space, solidity and emptiness, shadows and objects come to the fore.  

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The act of building the clay bears the marks of her fingers and tools which sometimes resemble the ancient script of a language that has gone.  Apart from the intuitive textures, Gaila's vessels are unadorned and unglazed.  Their character is that of something found and ancient, unsophisticated and natural; simple forms to be contemplated.

The small pinched pots, made to cup in the hand are smoke fired: these often relate to the dark.