A TRIP to Avebury on a pony and trap as a young girl with her best friend changed Patricia Low’s life when she spotted her first thumb pot in a museum in Avebury.
When talking at her exhibition at Salisbury Museum, titled The Wessex Case – An Installation by Patricia Low, she described the early experience as an emotional event and said: “I saw this little bronze age thumb pot and it moved me to tears. I thought it was wonderful. I didn’t think at that time I would ever make a thumb pot, but I just wanted to enjoy it.
“Eventually, I went to art school, and I wanted to paint and sculpt and be a printmaker and that’s what I did. “
Patricia trained as a painter at Swindon and Chelsea Art School from 1960-1964 and continued painting and printmaking until 1986 and revealed how she had brought an old farmhouse and had vaguely restored it.
She said: “There was a two-storey granary barn, so I had a print studio downstairs and painted upstairs.”
During the 1980s, Patricia went through a difficult time admitting that for ‘artists, it is often feast or famine.’
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Going away one weekend to stay with artist friends Joanna and Tim Harrison, her life unexpectedly changed again when Joanna showed her how to make a coil pot.
Patricia was animated when she said: “It was like the thumb pot experience, and I completely connected with that very early experience and loved the pinching and the coiling. It combined with my other work.
“So, I made a coil pot and made a pattern based on a vegetable leek and Joanna gave me raw oxides to use, and I realised I could paint on the pots.”
This turned into a learning curve for Patricia because she found painting on a pot was very different to painting up to an edge on paper because there’s a need to paint around the pot.
She admitted: “It doesn’t always work out.”
Her subjects come from the countryside where she sees owls, foxes, and hares and realised she could combine her love of nature and paint animals and birds on her pots.
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Guests to The Wessex Case – An Installation by Patricia Low were also treated to a conversation between Patricia and Museum director Adrian Green which revealed much more about her creativity and her life.
Patricia talked about having an epiphany with sculpting and painting three-dimensional, figurative images and her joy at exhibiting revealing that she went on to have many commissions from all over the world.
After the talk, guests could go and view her exhibition which will remain in place at the Salisbury Museum until March 20, 2023.
For more, go to PatriciaLowCeramics
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