Fountain Fine Art

Frank Hamer

I design and make press-moulded plates with fish for imagery. The plates incorporate ceramics with my interests in drawing and decoration. They should be read on four levels: as plates; as overall decorative objects; as specific imagery and, very importantly to me, as ceramic happenings. I like to see the thickness of glaze as it flows over the channels of sgraffito work, as it enlivens the coloured slips and fuses with the various added areas of pigment. I believe that ceramics should speak with the vocabulary of clay, glaze and colour strongly affected by fire.

I draw the fish on newspaper and cut them out to provide me with distinctive flat shapes. I use these to resist coloured slips to create the decoration. Some plates have as many as ten layers of slip brushed on to them and have other pigments applied before being glazed and reduction-fired to stoneware at 1250degC.

Fish can curve their bodies from side to side even to the point of nose to tail but have very restricted movement in flexing up and down as seen in a side view. Artists have always taken liberties with this up and down curve to give the impression of a swimming movement. I follow this precedent and I also accentuate the proportions of a fish and emphasise its detail to establish its character. The eyes, especially, are humanised, an anthropomorphic device used 300 years ago in the Middle East. Fish plates have their pedigree!