Sally Toms glaze paintings take a liminal pilgrimage through the Cumbrian Lake District.
A Landscape she knows intimately having been brought up on a Herdwick Hill Farm at the Head of the Great Langdale Valley.
With a distinctive dreamlike quality, her work retraces the literal and emotional terrain of her life whilst paying close attention to the textural diversity that has previously alluded traditional pastoral subjects.
The small hand rolled slab paintings act as miniature portals, encouraging the viewer to 'draw in close' and 'slip through' into worlds constructed entirely with the organic complexities of the ceramic material.
By rendering her personal 'moments in time' Sally is not only paying homage to her own multi-faceted ceramic practice.
But also to the organic, crystalline textures that form the innermost skeletons of the Cumbrian Fells and Coast.
Whilst sometimes the scenes are void of figures ,they still 'crack' and 'fizz' with the unexpected presence of animal, plant and human existence.
In doing so her work aims to re-address our connection with landscapes so readily considered 'idyllic', It explores not only a viewers place with in it, but the way in which the place becomes (and remains) encoded with in the viewers memory.
