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Pentimento > noun a visible trace of an earlier painting beneath a layer or layers of paint on a canvas

ORIGIN early 20th cent.: from Italian, literally 'repentance'.

Jaki Darlington and Caroline Hewitt’s work is underpinned by a mutual love of the animal world. They specialise in distinctive

hand-built ceramics, producing character driven animal sculpture and British birds. 

Through an experimentation with printmaking processes onto the surface of clay they have developed a range of illustrative ceramic tiles decorated with oxides, underglazes and lustres. Tiles can be bought as one-off gifts or can be made bespoke for bathrooms, kitchens or fireplace surrounds.
As a partnership Caroline & Jaki strive to extend their portfolio of work and enjoy the challenges of working to commission. 


Having both worked in Further and Higher Education for twenty years, Jaki and Caroline pooled their experience and set up the partnership in 2016. They are members of The High Peak Artists, at Gallery in the Gardens in Buxton  and are co-owners of The Artful Pigeon Gallery in Glossop. Known locally [and fondly] as 'Tile Lady' and 'Elephant Woman', they currently live and work as artists in Glossop, Derbyshire with their three cats.

I think of ceramics as a cross between making mud pies and a practical sort of meditation, with hands becoming muddier as the mind becomes more deeply focused. Ceramics demands that level of concentration. Clay as a material really appeals to me. I enjoy its recyclable nature:  it can be re-moulded and re-shaped until a piece develops into something pleasing, otherwise it can be thrown in the recycling bin in preparation to begin again. I don’t like to waste materials.

I like the idea that clay can be tired, stressed, and that it has a memory. It reminds us that clay is organic, once lived. Ceramic forms can also have a body, a neck, a collar and shoulders and vessels often have a lip, mouth, legs and feet.  I am intrigued by the relationship that ceramic objects share with the human form and I like to explore that connection in my work. Rather than producing a realistic representation of animals, my work seeks to capture the playfulness of animals, which often results in them inheriting human quirks and mannerisms.

Jaki Darlington

In the Autumn of 1993, my Dad discovered an abandoned bird's nest in his garden. I took it with me whenI returned to college in January 1994 and  produced a large series of drawings of it. These drawings formed the basis of my final year's work.This marked the beginning of what would become a longstanding obsession with British birds.

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Originally trained in Printed Textile Design at Heriot-Watt University, drawing and the application of image, pattern or motif to a surface has always been fundamental to my work.  I  work almost exclusively by drawing, printing and in ceramics, with clay sometimes fulfilling the same role as paper or fabric.

 

The versatility of clay enables me to develop my drawings very directly. I enjoy the properties of clay and its potential to be embossed and embellished and I use basic printmaking processes to image make on the surface of the tiles. 

Caroline Hewitt

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