Working in porcelain for nineteen years, Bev Milward treads a personal and intimate path referencing the landscape of her rural childhood, the atrophy of urban living and the rich heritage of English ceramics.
Bev Milward's work documents a lifetime of attempting to form something beautiful from the worthless, the meaningful from the meaningless. Using many traditional making methods she demonstrates craft values of folk art that reflect the undercurrents in society.
Aiming at first to delight and entertain the scale invites you to lose yourself in the detail of each piece. From external fantasies and inner dreamscapes, themes and characters emerge and fade. Childlike wonder gives way to a long-dormant memory or unspoken feeling that sparks rare, precious and sometimes unsettling connections between the artist and the observer.
Things are not always as they seem.
Tiny tools that have been gathered for over 30 years are used to make repeated motifs. Small moulds are made from sentimental found objects. Each piece is built entirely by hand, fired three times and decorated with slips, onglaze enamels and lustres. Bev is a creator at the political china experiment Stokes Croft China, PRSC and a director of the International Ceramics Festival.
