Monochrome

Working in the heart of the English South Downs where the calcified chalk land undulates and occasionally ruptures under foot, Tanya Gomez is developing her vessels in a terrain that is still in the making, and exposed to the elements of sky and sea in an affecting and visible way. You get the sense that Gomez’s choice of location is no accident but a deliberate setting that allows her explorations of creating form from earth (clay), allowing for a keen reflection of what is geologically happening below her feet. Gomez operates at the juncture of the functional and the allegoric, making vessels that are conscious of their formal antecedents and yet, always and willfully, moving away from the known or expected. Her craft is, by its intent and process, one of transformation, from earth to fire to solid, from divination to hand to vessel. The beauty is living with an ongoing experience of what these vessels really contain within. 
With an appearance of more traditional forms, the shapes are known but imbued with a nature more carnal, lending them strange tensions for the domestic environment. All this is done not in need of shock but of expression. Gomez sees, and senses, something in the clay that has yet to be expressed and her divining leads to half known parables of a time and place the modern mind may have forgotten. 
The monochromatic palette is brought into relief by the kiln reduction of natural minerals laid bare in the surface of the form, bringing hints of metallic to articulate the surface in relief. The forms themselves seem to have emerged from the land whose surface has been punctured, not by external forces but by some type of internal malevolence, leaving its presence known by its exit wound. 
Collectively, the vessels present a landscape that is mysterious, dramatic, potent, tangible and vast. Individually, they each take on a character or presence that develops alongside you, within you.