Over the course of 2023, Katie Spragg has immersed herself in a multi-site residency, traveling from Braemar, Scotland to Hauser & Wirth Menorca and concluding at Hauser & Wirth Somerset. Throughout this year-long project, the focus of Spragg’s ceramic practice has been as much about gathering, observation and investigation as producing the finished sculptures for the exhibition. Reflecting on her creative process, she considers how her artworks are themselves works in progress, markers in time along the way to the next idea or outcome. The accumulations of the three residency and research trips—plants, pottery fragments, drawings, stones, photographs and the resulting ceramic ‘tests’—have occupied and enriched both her studio and thinking.
Drawing upon reoccurring themes of care, community and the universality of plants, her experiences have brought new and vivid insight into local ecology and the life of flora. With this knowledge, Spragg has developed a unique and site-specific narrative that incorporates social engagement initiatives and the particularity of peoples’ stories. She has explored planted gardens and natural landscapes, benefiting from many insightful conversations with people working and living with plants across the three locations she has visited. Spragg’s interactions with herbalists, florists, landscapers, local families, school children and carers, combined with her own exploration of plants, have built upon her existing knowledge. These plants, and their stories, are woven into the sculptures she has made, layering new stories, names and uses. Works developed across this period, alongside outcomes made by primary school children and carers through community engagement workshops, will be featured in this exhibition.
Each residency and research trip has influenced different aspects of Spragg’s creative process. Braemar was an opportunity to investigate and explore, and it was here that Spragg established the overriding themes of the residency: the exploration of distance versus detail, using both clay and plants as a route to conversations with people, gathering and collating their stories and exploring plant life as indicators of climate and time. Themes explored in Scotland, UK were then reframed by the landscape and climate of Menorca, Spain. Gardeners and landscapers brought new knowledge and understanding of how a radically different climate to the UK changed the timing and length of plants’ growth cycles and the care and nurture they required. Returning to Somerset, UK for the final residency was an opportunity to reconnect with the familiar countryside and draw upon her accumulated research, working to a larger scale in the expanse of The Maltings Studios. Here, Spragg completed the final artworks while continuing conversations with local flower growers and herbalists, drawing together common themes and explorations. Works have emerged that consider the micro, with a hyperfocus on mosses and lichens juxtaposed with interpretations of expansive landscapes, almost too vast to capture.
Color has become increasingly important as Spragg has navigated the challenge of reflecting the vibrant and shifting light on a landscape using the permanence and unpredictability of clay. Spragg’s sketchbook slowly filled with a new palette of pinks, pale greens, lilacs and the shades of Menorcan cream-colored stone, contrasting with the inky blacks, burgundies, greys, greens and burnt ochre of Scotland, UK. The project has been an opportunity to move beyond methods of making that Spragg has been refining over the past seven years, drawing upon an expanding material knowledge to capture the essence of the plants and places she has encountered.
—
Image: Installation view, ‘Natural Practice,’ Make Hauser & Wirth Somerset, 2023. Photo: Dave Watts
