MAKING + MARKING
Ceramics by Scara B
28 April - 19 May 2023

And now indeed this substance with its precious humility becomes, through its indestructibility, the most faithful bearer of [a wo]man’s message…
Bernard Leach, A Potter's Book (1940)

Velorose is delighted to be hosting MAKING + MARKING, Scara B's first ever ceramics exhibition, featuring over 150 artworks ranging from the size (and shape) of a bulb of garlic to towering 1m-high vases. Scara B's exceptional work seems to inhabit a parallel world - one where everything appears simultaneously recognisable but strange; different, yet highly familiar

Scara B herself has a parallel existence, as accomplished architect and intrepid traveller Cara Bamford, and the connections between the MAKING + MARKING of her ceramics, and her profession, are various. Perhaps most clearly, she works as a ceramicist in a way that reverses the architectural process; by contrast to the extensive and considered way in which an architect designs and draws - long before a structure is realised - Scara B moves from 3D to 2D, making forms intuitively and only then scribing, painting with glaze, drawing, or bringing both identifiable and novel patterns to the shapes that emerge

Barely two and a half years after Scara B took up a ceramics morning class at Turning Earth in Hoxton, Coronavirus curtailed travel - to City Lit in Covent Garden and to her workplace in Fitzrovia, and equally to Papua New Guinea and Antarctica. Much of this work, which spans from March 2020 to March 2023, was made at home, in isolation, and yet it transports one to places well beyond Central London

Scara B is prolific and her work poetic, her work obsessive but open, and with each piece painstakingly numbered and dated, it forms not just a diary, but a travelogue. And where most expect an exhibition to be the culmination of a period of work, Velorose is proud to identify this show not as an ending, but as the beginning of a journey the boundaries of which are yet to be discovered

…as far back as one goes in time, the works of humanity from prehistoric times have reached us not through stone which crumbles and wears away, or through metal which oxidises and becomes like powder, but through slabs of pottery, the writing on which is as clear today as it was under the stiletto of the scribe who traced it
Bernard Leach, A Potter's Book (1940)

The artist and gallery would like to thank:

Kirsty Andrew
Jason Bruges
Carina Ciscato
City Lit
Friends and Family
Katy Ghahremani
Fiona Gould
Mimi Joung
Lindsay Lowe
Lorna Marshall
Private Collectors who have lent work
Ken Shuttleworth and the team at Make
Annie Turner
Turning Earth
Chris Vause
Len White