Tim Copsey
Tim Copsey’s ceramics combine the opulent and the organic. The Peak District, which surrounds his home and studio, is a lively landscape filled with motion, flux, texture and luster, providing both inspiration and material. The gold and silver burnishes on many of Copsey’s pieces are a response to rushing waterfalls and the dark reflections of peat pools. The Peak’s rock formations inspire layered, undulating, or coarse forms, whilst sections of grit stone and granite from the Pennines are often folded into the surface itself.
The Peak District Pennine landscape and seasons are the backdrop to everything Tim Copsey does. He makes pottery on the border between function and sculpture: in essence vases, bowls, bottles and cups, although these are really just ‘Serving Suggestions’. Work is multiply fired, often starting with the wood kiln and ending with lustres. Described as beautifully ugly. The the work is playful, sometimes jarring; surprising, delightful and ultimately resonant of their materiality and the landscape from which they derive. Tim Copsey’s ceramics combine the opulent and the organic. The Peak District, which surrounds his home and studio, is a lively landscape filled with motion, flux, texture and luster, providing both inspiration and material. The gold and silver burnishes on many of Copsey’s pieces are a response to rushing waterfalls and the dark reflections of peat pools. The Peak’s rock formations inspire layered, undulating, or coarse forms, whilst sections of grit stone and granite from the Pennines are often folded into the surface itself. In this way, his pieces are both about and of the landscape. Whether hand-building or throwing, his process is an interaction with material, beginning with adaptations in clay; Copsey pushing each piece to the limits of stability, before investigating the interactions of glazes and the effects of firing. There is a conversation with the kiln, a push and pull between control and submission, wood firing creating fluid transformations which are often unexpected. His process is one of constant transformation, resulting in pieces which are mercurial: shifting with the light, modifying in each angle viewed, conversing with their environment.
As an undergraduate he fully intended to pursue ceramics, but while studying sculpture at Bretton Hall (now the Yorkshire Sculpture Park) he discovered working collaboratively with artists in other disciplines more fulfilling and ultimately built a career in multimedia, film, performance and installation art which saw him working and showing Internationally. His return to pottery in the early 2000s was immediate and visceral. Within a year he established a studio and built a wood-fired kiln in the Peak District. Since then his work has developed through an experimental and playful exploration of simple forms that offer continual adaption, whether that’s through throwing, coiling or slab work. He is represented by a number of galleries and has work in many private and public collections.
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