Viewing Room 15: Ceramics by Matthew Richardson, prints by Liz Taunt and sculpture by Jonathan Clarke

Liz Taunt grew up in Cambridge and went to art school in Cambridge, Devon and London. She has worked as an arts administrator and an art therapist, amongst other things. Liz trained as an art therapist at Goldsmiths, London University in the early 90s and has been exhibiting regularly since the 80s. She has taken part in open studios in London and Suffolk. Liz moved from Shepherds Bush, west London to Bungay on the Norfolk Suffolk border in 2012.

Before returning to printmaking in Bungay, she made papier mâché vessels in London and experimented with dyeing and pattern making on textiles.  She has transferred this experimental approach to her production process. Liz uses many different printmaking techniques including dry point, lino, collagraph and monoprint, and has recently been making collages from discarded prints.

Liz says of her approach - that she prefers to make things which surprise me and prompt the question “where did that come from?”

She is not particularly interested in narrative or realism in her art. Instead, she is trying to bring something new into the world which combines the chaotic, the arbitrary and the awkward.

It seems to her that while we all spend most of our time engaged with the realities of life - from the mundane to the wonderful - we also spend some of our time in a parallel world of abstraction and imagination. Liz likes to get lost (in a nice way) in this parallel world and tries to invent ciphers and shorthand to describe her particular reality.

Matthew Richardson lives and works in Norwich, UK. He studied at Central St Martins, Cardiff (MA) and Kingston School of Art (PhD), creating experimental visual work from archival fragments and waste. He has worked across various media and contexts including installation, printmaking, bookworks and illustration. 

His work has been shown in both gallery and museum spaces such as Outpost, Transition, g39, Hweg, Kingston Museum and The Beaney. Commissions have included projects with the V&A, the British Library and the Poetry Society. Work is held in collections of MOMA Wales, the Brecknock Art Trust and private collections across the UK, Europe and USA.

"I am drawn to the fragmentary, and look for ways to make elements fit - technically and poetically. Images and objects evolve through a process of sifting, ordering, forming and reforming, in an ongoing play between wild chance and meticulous placement. I like the way clay is a material that records a history of its own making and how firing and glazing creates an unpredictable alchemy that can turn objects into things that are new yet timeless."

Jonathan Clarke was born in 1961 and raised near Bury St Edmund's, Suffolk. At the age of sixteen he was apprenticed to his father, the renowned sculptor Geoffrey Clarke (RA), one of Britain’s twentieth century modern masters.

Jonathan works in sand-cast aluminium, initially building and carving his sculpture in polystyrene. This method relies on the destruction of the original mould as it is vaporised by pouring molten aluminium into the sand-cast, resulting in an entirely unique sculpture. Other recent works have been made in cast iron.

He continues to live and work in rural Suffolk. He began exhibiting his own sculpture in the early 1980s. He has developed an extensive catalogue of cast metal and poured concrete sculptures during the last thirty years. His work has been included in several significant private collections.

Jonathan's style while abstract, reference the figure and the architectural. They carry a great deal of emotional resonance, often taking inspiration from social, spiritual and mythological subject matter. Other influences that Jonathan cites include the sculptors Eduardo Chillida and Anthony Caro, as well as two-dimensional artists such as Robert Motherwell and Mark Rothko.

Jonathan has had a series of successful exhibitions across East Anglia and internationally, in Italy, Denmark and the US, and the Metropolitan Art Museum in Tokyo, Japan. Between 1989 and 1999, he was selected for the Royal Academy Summer Show seven times.

His skill in creating monumental sculptures has attracted a number of prestigious commissions. Public commissions in the East of England include an eleven metre wall-mounted cross for Ely Cathedral 'The Way Of Life', 2001, an eye-catching figure for the town of Colchester 'Boudica', 1999, and a twelve-piece exhibit for Trinity Hall’s permanent collection in Cambridge 'Twelve', 2006,