This summer, CAMPLE LINE is delighted to present Love Bites, an exhibition of new work in ceramic by artist Bryony Rose.
Rose brings together a new body of work that extends her exploration of glazed ceramic sculptural relief and builds upon two recent solo shows Blinking, glare at Quench Gallery in Margate in 2024, and Night Jar at Kiosk in Glasgow in 2023. In ten new works made for Love Bites, Rose has expanded the range of her subjects to include horseflies, erupting insect bites, dandelion seed heads and fields of sheep viewed through car windows. Challenging the pastoral language of traditional decorative ceramics, she also tells semi-autobiographical stories of longing and restlessness that foreground the at times abrasive, repetitive and banal aspects of adolescent rural experience.
Raised in rural Dumfries and Galloway, Rose trained in painting and printmaking at The Glasgow School of Art, and then moved to Margate in 2019 where she was an associate artist at Open School East. Over the last seven years, she has focused her practice around the development of ceramic sculptural reliefs and an exploration of narrative that has centred on memories of her rural Scottish upbringing. She is interested in the relationship between lived experience and memory, using remembered sensations and images as a starting point to complicate narrative and explore emotional response: ‘I am drawn to the inherent eeriness and nostalgia that can be pulled out of these memories - on a personal and cultural level.’ For Rose, the process of creating a pattern and ordering the parts are all a kind of fiction: ‘When memory fails there are optical errors.’
For both Night Jar and Blinking, glare, Rose developed a vocabulary of motifs that drew upon particular memories - of walking home along a narrow, unlit country track or across the village park as evening or night falls. These are journeys ‘made hundreds of times’, unremarkable and indistinct. We see brambles, bindweeds, football pitch markings, flood lights, the beam of a car’s lights - images that suggest repetition, overgrowth, seasonal darkness, apprehension and jarring sensory input. Partial images, fragments of texture, half-scenes tessellate; nightjars, rooks and moths provide the only witnesses to ‘otherwise empty scenes.’
Throughout Rose’s work, the imagery around teenage rites of passage assumes the same cultural value as more traditional motifs, such as the decorative foliage, flora, birds and animals associated with the ornamental tile-making revival of the Arts and Craft Movement. Her tiles are hand-made and maintain a delicate balance between the pictorial and sculptural. She has eschewed the familiar square tile format for imprecise rectangles, narrow oblongs, sharp diagonals and irregular disks - the register of one tile to the next never quite exact. Football pitch line markings are incised into flat tiles, whilst blackberry drupelets are rendered as glazed, bulging convex circles. Rabbits are hand-carved into the tile surface whilst sections of floodlight casing are individually shaped.
For Love Bites, Rose has drawn upon the last summer she spent in Dumfriesshire before moving to Glasgow aged seventeen, framed by memories of ‘an all-consuming first love and the draining feeling of being at home and with my family at that time’. She has recalled: ‘The clegs were particularly intense that summer, biting my mole-scattered skin.’ In this sense, the exhibition’s title alludes to both the horsefly’s bite and the hickey – an emblem of teenage longing - and perhaps a contemporary adolescent recasting of John Donne’s flea. The ‘vulnerability of exposed skin’ is bluntly evoked in a series of four reliefs that feature horseflies embedded in fleshy pink bites rendered as concentric raised circles that immediately recall aggravated blisters or eruptions. In other works, Rose has interspersed domestic motifs that speak of a state of imminence, of the slippages of adolescence, of coming adulthood. In Biting point, for instance, we see firstly a sheep pattern endlessly repeated, only then noticing the presence of a car door and a rolled down window, and with it a sense of moving through or leaving behind, a restlessness for what is ahead.