​Jess Skelton is an award winning artist with a background in psychology and production pottery. Her work is sourced in the vessel and employs playful and disruptive techniques that push material to its limits. The work is a dialogue between maker, environment and material. Equal weight is given to intention and happenstance and making marks are left explicit and often elevated.  

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​An identification with precarious existences and marginalised communities underpins the work. Jess is particularly drawn to what she calls ‘The Shadowlands, physical spaces out  beyond society's polished facades where the natural world exposes and reclaims humanity’s interventions.

 

Jess works predominantly in clay with the backdrop of a multiplicity of media as inspiration and process, She is drawn to boatyards and their inhabitants, collisions of opposites, dereliction, detritus, graffiti and the colours of toy cars.

  

Alongside making work Jess teaches throwing,  expressive handbuilding and surface decoration.

 

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