About Penny Watts
2019 - 26: The last few years, marked by illness, personal loss, and the cancellation of a long-planned exhibition due to Covid, has brought an unexpected stillness to my practice.
Grief, fatigue, and uncertainty created a prolonged artistic block, but they also deepened my relationship with the materials I return to now. As I reemerge, I find myself drawn again to the themes that have always anchored my work: memory, touch, and the traces we carry. These experiences have renewed my interest in exploring form and medium as ways of holding emotion, fragile, layered, and quietly persistent.
Across all mediums, I am searching for ways to make visible the imprints of memory: the things we inherit, the things we lose, and the subtle marks they leave behind.
2018 - 19: For the past 2 years I have been working on my Masters by Research (practice based) in Fine Art. My MA body of work, named Flux, is made up of a series of paintings and prints. My studio practice has always been very much process-led, and Flux embodies an endless process of experimentation with colour, form, medium and texture.
It is a series where each work follows on from the previous one, informed by questions I asked myself concerning what would’ve happened within the work if I’d done this or that differently, or used a different material or technique. In addition to my curiosity about process and texture, Flux signifies a shift in my working methods, in that it is also highly involved with emotion and feeling. This is partly due to personal life events, but also in reaction to a growing unease about what’s happening in the wider world.
2017 - 18: My current work is concerned with the act of transforming subjective feelings into visual art. It has been a personal exploration of mixing textile and fine art processes, from which a body of work has emerged.
2016 - 17: My work is concerned with recycling of the tangible and the intangible. This year this moved into questioning the importance and value of various elements in my life; memories and connections to the past, treasured family belongings, the skills I learnt from my parents and grandparents as a child, my family, a love of making, my allotment, the unknown anticipation of each new day.
In my studio practice I have been exploring ways to link my past and my present. It is a process of regeneration; it is a creation and recreation of my own journey. It is a pathway of experimentation on thoughts, made tangible by materials, colours and textures. A journey that holds endless possibilities, and is never ending for me.
My current body of work mainly uses ceramics and printmaking, however it is always informed my background in textiles and my love of colour, no matter the medium.