Toni Losey 1977 - date

I was fascinated by the weirdly organic plant/alien  like sculptures made by Canadian artist Toni Losey, her work is made on the potters wheel and she assembles different rounded pieces together to create these strange forms, she then decorates the surface with several layers of underglaze and glaze that she sprays on and fires repeatedly to create some depth and texture in the surface.

After my last assessment and more recently after I had begun to push the work I was doing I revisited Toni Losey's work and hadn't realised how amazing it is! The pieces are so inspirational to me, I would love to be able to get to a place where my work is evolving like her has done. There is a discipline and meticulous nature to her approach to making, she uses the potters wheel but the resulting forms do not reveal this, they could have been hand built with pinch pots and coils or even slip cast or press moulded. I think she achieves an incredible  aesthetic where there is a tension between the surreal and uncanny and the organic world. Could they be macro versions of seeds, sea creatures, funghi or plants.

I have been concerned about making work that was obviously trying to mimic the real world, getting hung up on things ending up being too mushroom looking or plant looking. Looking again at Losey's work I can see that if I just keep pushing, experimenting, using colour and glaze in different ways there is potential to achieve something that could be really interesting and evocative. I need to be braver!