URSULA CECIL - POET PAINTER OR POTTER

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Ursula drifted Cambridgewards only a couple of years ago. Her studio in the chic and sheltered Albert Street is a wonder of artistic flair, new material, recent experiments .But she remains close to her Atlantic inspiration from her years on the Brittany coast, and her poems reach out there and back in time to the pottery of the Bronze Age . She has even replicated the look of an ancient discovery in her own kiln

But it is her lovely writing which melds with the work in her hand that makes her so creative.

Here she tells it in a poetic history of one of her works. , Atlantic Clay

from the deep to my hands

I am writing a story in old grey sediment small dark pages 5 centimetres square made of an ooze a calcareous ooze found in the depths of the Atlantic ocean

at first I wondered what on earth I should make with it what would make sense of this geological treasure

something splendid - historic -
a mythological sea creature a bird a fish
or simply a bowl I could colour and burnish

in the end it was so damnably sticky
too sticky to throw on my old potter’s wheel and not very smooth or plastic or workable absorbed water very quick and dried very slow it cracked and split if carelessly handled
and not at all like the clay that I know

so I made a few tiles and a couple of bowls
shaped in an old French earthenware mould patterned them with leaves of sage fern and thyme and left them to dry in the afternoon sunshine

then put them in my kiln...
(my studio smelt wonderful for an hour or so

as the temperature slowly rose)

they fired a pale ochre at 1000 degrees
and felt very light and fragile and biscuity

yet I had imagined a warm terracotta but there’s no iron oxide so deep I am told

and taken up higher to 1250 degrees
the sediment melted and became a matt glaze very beautiful - but no longer a bowl

I now have three different sediments from three different depths

and three different ages
and time presses its presence in my mind like a charge for I remember once holding a jug made in Persia
and my thumb fitted the impression of the potter’s thumb made in the clay 3,000 years ago – as if it were mine

so I wrote a few words in the small dark grey pages

‘what happens to time when a memory
fills that space between the then and the now’

and then I think of the ocean – the Atlantic ocean this vast and powerful majestic sea
of the movement above and the stillness below where the sediment lies

and I’d like to go to the west coast of Brittany
gaze out over the waves to where the sea meets the sky and fill a small bowl made of this old old sediment
with clear salty water

The jug in Ursula’s studio

Ursula in Colour

Seascape