Tim Copsey
Ceramicist & Sculpture Lounge Tutor
The Peak District Pennine landscape and its seasons are the backdrop to everything Tim Copsey Makes: this is pottery on the border between function and sculpture; in essence vases, bowls, bottles and cups, although these are really just ‘Serving Suggestions’. Works such as the Waterfall pieces are directly Inspired by observing and depicting how water races over and around rocks, glistening and reflective, as direct a reference to pouring as the onomatopoeic ‘tok tok’ of the tokkuri form. Tim finds deep inspiration in Japanese forms and techniques, early experiments in camouflage such as dazzle, Prehistoric ceramic forms and Situationist art.
In addition to being a potter he works with artists and creative organisations as a film maker. Which affords him the opportunity to investigate how ceramics and film overlap. “I’m interested in the performative nature of how film can incorporate it’s subject”, this has resulted in a series of short films called; ‘Serving Suggestions’.
Surfaces are built up over multiple firings, often starting in the wood kiln and ending with lustres. His work has been described as ‘beautifully ugly’ or like ‘space debris’ – he hopes that the work is playful, elemental if occasionally jarring or surprising and ultimately resonant of their materiality and the landscape from which they derive.
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“Like archaeological finds from the debris of life in space – discarded in the Milky Way, picking up layers of galactic minerals and crystals over millions of years.”
“(His work) looks like it is in the middle of some alchemical change – it excites us with the drama .”
“I think Tim’s pots speak a thousand words. ey are itching to tell us a story and that story is one of the force of life – of life in all its forms – the darkness and the light. ”
“What really interested me about Tim’s work is their almost gender fluid quality: they are elegant and feminine with their pinks, golds and sparkly inclusions, but masculine and solid with the rough and free way in which they are constructed.”
“ey are yin and yang: a unification of both ‘femininity’ and ‘masculinity’. I see them as solid and reassuring but decorated with a decadent touch that elevates them into objects of beauty and desire.”