Exhibition · SCOPE Collective · September 2025

Cycle Arts
Festival

Ceramics on a cycle route. Work encountered in motion rather than stood still in front of it.

Event

Cycle Arts Festival 2025

Role

Exhibiting Artist — SCOPE Collective

Location

Renfrewshire Cycle Routes, Scotland

Dates

12–14 September 2025

Pieces

3–4 ceramic vessels and forms

The problem

Work on a cycle route is passed, not studied. It has to function at speed, outdoors, or it doesn't function.

What I made

Wheel-thrown pieces with the forms kept quiet and the surfaces doing the work.

What made it hard

A gallery gives you a white wall, still air and someone standing two feet away. This gave me none of those, and each absence changed a decision.

Encounter Read in motion, at cycling pace — not stood in front of
Light Natural, changing, outdoors — not the studio's artificial light the glazes were tested under
Siting Low-impact installation; work had to earn its place in the landscape rather than impose on it
Commission Made in response to a specific location, not adapted to one

The turn

Quiet the form so the surface can carry it

At cycling pace a complicated silhouette is noise — there isn't time to resolve it. So the forms got simpler on purpose, and everything that had to do the work was pushed into the glaze: layered applications encouraging variation, crystallisation and spangling. Restrained forms used to foreground what the surface is doing. That is also why the firing programme split across two temperatures rather than settling on one.

The Festival

Cycle Arts Festival is an outdoor, mixed-arts programme on Renfrewshire's cycle routes — developed with local and national organisations to bring artist-made work into the landscape rather than into a room. The infrastructure of cycling becomes the gallery infrastructure: the route, the light, the weather, the pace of the encounter.

Artists are commissioned to respond to specific locations, with the expectation that movement shapes how the work is read. You're not standing two feet back from a piece with time to consider it. You're passing through. The work has to function in that context or it doesn't function.

The festival prioritises environmental sustainability, low-impact installation, and work that earns its place in the landscape rather than imposing on it.

The Work

The pieces were produced specifically for the outdoor context — forms kept quiet, surfaces doing the work. All wheel-thrown. Two clay bodies: white stoneware for most of the work, flecked stoneware for the Dark Crystal Spangles bowl.

The firing programme was split across two temperatures. The majority of the work went through Cone 9 reduction — the kind of firing where the atmosphere in the kiln matters as much as the glaze recipe. The bowl was fired at Cone 6.

Clay Bodies

White stoneware, flecked stoneware

Firing

Cone 9 reduction, Cone 6 oxidation

Technique

Layered glaze application, surface testing

Studio

Outer Spaces, Abbey House

Cone 9 Reduction · White Stoneware

Andra's Sparkle

Cone 9 Reduction · White Stoneware

Crystal Emerald × Spangles

Cone 9 Reduction · White Stoneware

White Bird Spangled × Honey Yellow

Cone 6 · Flecked Stoneware

Dark Crystal Spangles

Glaze Behaviour

The glazes were layered to encourage variation, crystallisation, and spangling — restrained forms used to foreground what the surface was doing. That approach reads differently in natural light than it does in a kiln room.

Observation — Crystal Emerald × Spangles

The copper in Crystal Emerald behaved better outside than expected.

The green shifts that copper carbonate produces in reduction came through clearly in outdoor light — more legibly than they typically read under artificial light in the studio. The spangling held too. Worth factoring into how this glaze gets used for outdoor contexts going forward, including the Cherry-Vision show and the Kala Topi table setting.

The Installation

Inside the tent,
along the route.

The work was installed within the SCOPE tent, positioned directly on the cycle route and integrated into the landscape rather than set apart from it. Cyclists and pedestrians encountered the work in motion — there was no fixed viewing position, no prescribed distance.

Natural light, weather conditions, and proximity to the path were part of how the pieces read. The surface quality that matters most in ceramics — the spangling, the glaze breaks, the way crystallisation catches light — was exposed to the full variability of outdoor September conditions in Scotland. That variability was the point.

Work encountered through movement rather than stood still in front of it — that's a different kind of attention. — Cycle Arts Festival, Renfrewshire, September 2025

Festival

Cycle Arts Festival 2025

Collective

SCOPE Collective

Studio Support

Outer Spaces, Abbey House

Related

Multanni Mitti practice

Where it landed

Shown on Renfrewshire's cycle routes in September 2025 as part of the festival programme — inside the tent and along the route. The pieces were made for that context rather than adapted to it, and the surfaces held up in natural light, which is the thing a studio test cannot tell you.

What it unblocked

The copper in Crystal Emerald read more legibly outdoors than under studio light — the opposite of what I expected, and the spangling held with it. That is a reusable finding rather than a one-off result: it changes which glazes I reach for in any outdoor commission, and it fed straight into Cherry-Vision.

Next Exhibition

Crafted by Design
→