This exhibition brings together the work of James Evans and Claire Cansick, two artists whose practices are grounded in a close dialogue with material, landscape, and transformation. Though working across different media, both approach making as a process of discovery rather than control, allowing form, surface, and atmosphere to emerge through intuition and response.
You can meet with James and Claire at special events being held at Woolmarket House this May. See below for more and book your place.
James Evans’ ceramic sculptures occupy a space between object and organism. Built through negotiation with clay itself, his forms resist fixed interpretation, appearing at once bodily, architectural, and archaeological. Their heavily worked surfaces, fluid glazes, and high-fired textures carry a sense of compression and movement, recalling both historical ceramics and naturally eroded forms. His work invites a physical encounter — a slow, tactile kind of looking shaped by weight, surface, and proximity.
Claire Cansick’s paintings similarly inhabit a shifting territory between observation and emotion. Drawing on the landscapes and coastlines of East Anglia, her compositions merge sea, sky, memory, and symbolic imagery into unstable environments charged with psychological tension. Figures, skeletal forms, and shadows drift through scenes of flood, fire, and weather, reflecting both personal experience and a broader sense of ecological unease.
Together, the works in this exhibition explore states of transition: solidity and collapse, beauty and threat, control and surrender. Clay buckles, glazes run, water shifts, horizons dissolve. In both practices, meaning emerges through process and transformation rather than certainty.
At the centre of the exhibition is a shared attentiveness to the behaviour of materials and the emotional resonance they carry. Whether through the density of fired clay or the volatility of painted sea and sky, Evans and Cansick each create works that feel simultaneously intimate and elemental — rooted in touch, memory, and the unstable conditions of the natural world.
MEET THE ARTISTS
There are opportunities to meet with James Evans on successive Saturdays up until the end of this exhibition on 30 May - from 2pm onwards.
Claire Cansick will be at Woolmarket House to talk about her paintings on Tuesday 26 May from 2pm onwards,
Please email us to book a place as space will be limited.
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About the author
Paul Vater
PAUL VATER
Paul conducts studio visits to maintain strong relationships with artists, designers and craftspeople who show their work with us. He manages the main C&C website and has developed the online shop where selected works are presented for sale.
Paul established his design company, Sugarfree, in 1990 and quickly gained a reputation for delivering fresh, effective marketing campaigns and brand identities for clients including Save the Children Fund, United Nations Association and UNHCR. Over the years those added to the roster include IPC Magazines, Arts Council England, The Roundhouse, Barbican Centre, Arts Marketing Association, Look Ahead Housing and Care, Paddington Waterside, BBC Worldwide, Commonwealth Foundation, Prestel, City of London Corporation, Baker Street Quarter, Victoria BID and the University of East Anglia.