Shirley Vauvelle is an established artist working from her studio near the coast in North Yorkshire. She works full time on ceramic sculpture and abstract/semi abstract paintings.
She comes from a textile educational background, with a degree in Surface Pattern at Leicester Polytechnic, Shirley has been practising working with clay for 16 years and mostly self taught apart from an adult learning course and a week long hand build course. She likes the challenge of working with different clays and building up the quality of surface. Her works are hand-built stoneware sculptures with porcelain and found materials, she wants to create work that can be work individually or as a group, The components within the pieces, separately made, are elements that are interchangeable, enabling a playful nature to the sculptures.
Shirley has painted since a child, but it is only recently that Shirley has devote half of her practice time to painting. She treats the canvas in a similar way to the surface of the clay in layers, striving for depth. Adding and subtracting to find the perfect tension, balance between colour, shape surface and structure.
The underlying theme of all her works is inspired by the scale and power of nature and how that makes her feel. Often creating her own worlds to for viewers to escape into.