Kirsty Macrae is a British artist and ceramicist whose practice explores the relationship between painting, form and surface. Working across ceramics and painting, she creates pieces that are rooted in drawing, gesture and colour, with forms often rooted in remembered places, landscapes and moments of observation.
Kirsty graduated from The Glasgow School of Art in 2009 with a BA (Hons) in Fine Art Painting and Printmaking. Her work is informed by a painter's approach to making, using clay not only as a material for constructing form but also as a surface for mark-making and experimentation.
Drawing inspiration from the heritage of eighteenth-century English slipware pottery, Kirsty uses traditional ceramic techniques as a starting point for creating contemporary vessels and sculptural forms. Expressive brushwork, layered slips, glazes and oxides create surfaces that echo the energy and spontaneity of painting, while the hand-built forms retain a strong connection to the drawn line.
At the heart of her practice is a dialogue between observation and making. Sketches, studies and paintings form the starting point for new work, which is then developed slowly into hand-built ceramic pieces. As her painting practice evolves, it increasingly sits alongside her ceramic work, sharing the same visual language of colour, surface and gesture.
Drawing forms the foundation of Kirsty's creative process. Ideas begin as sketches, paintings or studies, which are then developed into three-dimensional forms through the slow and tactile process of hand-building.
Each ceramic piece is constructed using coils of red earthenware clay. The unfired surface is decorated with handmade slips, applied through a combination of traditional pottery techniques and painterly mark-making. Layers of colour and gesture are built gradually, allowing the surface to develop alongside the form.
The work is then dried slowly over several weeks before being bisque fired. Glazes and oxide washes are applied to create depth, texture and variation, before a final firing at 1100°C completes the process.
The resulting pieces reflect Kirsty's ongoing interest in the intersection of painting and ceramics, where surface and form are developed together and each informs the other.
