Felicity ONeill – Worcestershire Open Studios

80 Felicity ONeill

Ceramics and Mixed Media

Artform: Ceramics & Pottery, Mixed media

Until recently, my own creative voice has remained largely in the background of my professional life. Taking part in Worcestershire Open Studios this year feels like an important moment to bring that voice forward and share my personal practice more openly.
My career has been rooted in the creative arts. Trained as an art teacher, I have worked with children and young people from a wide range of educational backgrounds, including five years as a specialist art teacher for students with Special Educational Needs. Throughout this time, my central motivation has been to inspire curiosity, nurture confidence, and encourage people to discover their own creative potential through making. I now work freelance as a creative practitioner in community arts.
I am particularly drawn to the decorative arts and the relationship surface & function. An exploratory approach lies at the heart my practice, ideas develop through experimentation, play and enquiry and my work sits between drawing, painting, printmaking and ceramics. I often begin with simple line drawings created from observation or a photograph as a way to explore composition, shape & pattern to which I add colour. These sketches form the starting point and inform much of what I make.
I’m interested in how a drawn mark can move from paper into clay, and how printing and drawing processes can become part of the ceramic surface itself, creating subtle low-relief textures or inlaid lines.
I also work with sgraffito, drawing directly into coloured slips so that the surface keeps the energy of a sketch. I admire the ceramics of ancient civilisations; their shapes and forms, carved geometric patterns, simple imagery and mark making techniques and are an ongoing source of inspiration for me.
I try to create surfaces that are loose, painterly and sketch-like — keeping the drawing alive within the clay. I love to include colour in my work too and it is for this reason that I work in earthenware.
I look forward to sharing this evolving body of work later this year at Worcestershire Open Studio’s , I will be sharing a venue with neighbours in my village of Colwall at Spring Grove , 30 The Crescent WR13 6QN.