Surfacing by Heather Gibson: Ceramic stoneware rooted in materiality and memory.

County Hall Pottery presents Surfacing by Heather Gibson, the first solo show from its inaugural Potter in Residence.

Running until 7 September 2025, the exhibition marks Heather Gibson’s debut as County Hall Pottery’s very first Potter in Residence.

On display are a collection of hand-built, gas-reduced ceramic stoneware full of textural undulations and experimental glaze work. These include large sculptural pieces, vessels, and wall-based works.

Featuring glistening mottled surfaces layered with glaze and slip, Surfacing lays bare the marks of its maker, as Gibson scores and tears through the clay. She builds up multi-dimensional surfaces, inviting us as viewers to look beyond the surface and form - to witness memory made material.

In our recent curation of Colour Stories, we explored ‘Baked Clay’, a medium that takes on a spectrum of patina over the course of its life. Clay reveals hidden landscapes underneath our feet. The ground is both a surface and vessel, a place where the past exists not as fixed marks, but as forces in constant transformation.

Gibson’s pieces are landscapes of their own, their form inspired in part by discoveries of weathered pottery shards that appear along the banks of the River Thames - fragments of history revealed by the shifting tide.

It’s perhaps no wonder we were drawn to Heather’s work, ceramic bodies that utter to the geological transformation undergone by clay. Through this transformation - an alchemy of heat, fire, gravity, and friction - Gibson’s ceramics chart an elemental journey.

“To work with clay is to converse with time” - Heather Gibson

She lets the kiln dictate the final narrative, applying her experimental approach of reduction firing, a technique she began refining during her MA at the Royal College of Art.

Using the large gas kiln on site at County Hall - a historic building steeped in its own stories to tell - Gibson harnessed her environment to help shape the work on display, grounding it in place as much as the processes the work undergoes.

“To work with clay is to converse with time” she puts. “These are not mere surfaces but temporal landscapes, palimpsestic assemblies of debris and matter, the collective accumulation of past impressions and the memory of forgotten forms.

“I want to reveal the intrinsic energy of materials", she adds. “My work seeks to bridge the gap between art and the everyday object, the past and the present, the material and immaterial world.”

Discover more on Heather Gibson’s debut ‘Surfacing’ at County Hall Pottery here, on display until 7 September 2025.