Andrea Brewer

I am a Watlington-based artist specialising in abstract
ceramic sculpture.
From a young age I have always been a keen maker, and as
a child also dreamt about becoming a scientist. However,
having discovered at school that I was a poor physics and
chemistry student, I gave up on that idea! It was only after
taking a ceramics evening class in my twenties when I discovered an outlet for both my creative and
scientific passions that I fell in love with the medium of clay. I love the fusion of art and science
involved in the experimental processes of ceramics.
After a couple of years of informal adult ceramics classes, I took a City and Guilds in Ceramics. It was
there, and afterwards during a 3-year artist residency at a North London secondary school, that I
developed my style of spiral-inspired, hand-built sculpture and first started exhibiting my work. My
sculpting continued for many years as just a side line, alongside full-time work, but it was only in 2019
that I launched ABCeramics more formally and with the help of Oxfordshire Artweeks, started working
as a professional, commissioned artist.
Apart from finding the spiral a beautiful and pleasing form, I am intrigued by its symbolic significance.
Spirals can be seen extensively in nature in the form of plant structures, patterns of growth, and in
the movement of elements. Prehistoric cave painting, tribal carving and Celtic/Viking knotwork are all
ancient examples of spiral motifs and seem to demonstrate how early humans instinctively knew the
significance of the spiral, which modern science has since proven with the discoveries of the double
helix of DNA all the way up to spiral galaxies. I am also fascinated by clockwork and mechanical
machinery, the workings of which I see as a moving representation of the spiral.
Most of my work to date has taken the form of hand-built ceramic sculpture, primarily using a
stoneware clay that has had ground fired clay (grog) mixed into it. This, combined with dry matt
glazes (my own recipes) creates a textured quality to the surface resembling lichens and moulds found
in nature, or rusts and patinas that natural forces create on man-made materials. I enjoy blurring the
boundary between the natural and the man-made – to make stylised, almost industrial or mechanical
forms that also appear strangely organic. I am fascinated by urban decay and the way nature
‘reclaims’ man-made structures. It is a reminder that most man-made materials originated from
natural materials, and that despite all our attempts to preserve them will eventually, in time, revert
back to nature.